This is amazing, since there is no enforcement mechanism. For decades they agreed on targets, which drove up speculative pricing, and they all cheated. The fact that they can’t even go back to agreeing in public to drive up prices indicates some serious back-room politics that isn’t reaching the press.
I’ll wager that back room politics is Sunni vs. Shia. The middle east is at war, but they are doing it economically. Saudi Arabia is hurting itself badly in terms of foreign exchange. There has to be a reason they are pursing policies that could potentially cause the downfall of the House of Saud. (The king stays in power by paying off problems. Paying away problems has been bad politics since recorded history began.)
For a few years now, I’ve felt Saudi’s oil options were getting more narrow. They recently finished a ‘near off-shore’ facility...which made me wonder, why are the Saudis drilling for the ‘hard to get’ oil, when they have so much shallow oil? I think the answer must be that their existing fields are declining in production.
So no more 1950’s technology and ultra cheap extraction costs....and the price gap between Saudi oil and oil produced elsewhere gets smaller.
So, their problems get even worse...and the only thing that holds the ‘kingdom’ together is buying off the populace. It could get real ugly. And now there is always fracking in the background. Unless we self impose some environmental nonsense, the Saudi’s will never again be able to ‘kill off’ the US oil industry - so they get no reward whatsoever when prices drop...just the hurt.
Oh, and a certain idiot just released hundreds of billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets. Its almost like we’re trying to establish Iran as the new leader in the middle east.
Swami says: war will continue in the region.