Ukraine: military (Aug '14 to mid-June '15) closed

[OUTLAW 09]

I just explained that; possibly it wasn't clear.

Nobody really "led" OPEC at that point, because OPEC effectively collapsed. Its production quotas, its only tools for supporting the price, were voluntary and when countries ceased to follow them, the cartel lost all power.

What has to be understood is that this process started slowly. When prices dropped slightly, oil producers pumped more because their political masters wanted the money. When prices dropped a little more, they pumped even more, because the political masters still wanted more money.

If they were thinking long term and if they trusted each other, they could have all decided to cut back production and forced the price back up. They weren't thinking long term, and they didn't trust each other, so they didn't do that. They acted to bail themselves out in the short run, by pumping more and selling more. Once the spiral started they couldn't break out of it, largely because they didn't trust each other enough to cooperate.

As a result the US had a 10 year cheap oil joyride, the Soviet Union went broke, and oil producers everywhere had a very miserable decade, very much including the Saudis.

This has been picked apart in near infinite detail by oil industry analysts, and I don't know of anyone in that community who buys into the idea that the oil glut was intentionally contrived as a weapon. It had a lot to do with chaos, suspicion, and mistrust, not much to do with conspiracy.

Really Dayuhan you are still stating the KSA does not "guide nor influence" OPEC---even in times of overproduction which if you really do look at the numbers from that period-- then why did the two major producers of sour crude the exact same quality as that which comes out of the Urals overproduce?

Why would anyone cut their income deliberately via overproduction if that is what you are saying ---it was general overall overproduction that caused the low income earnings. The OPEC is smart enough to fully understand overproduction in a normal demand market does not lead to a great cash flow--so again why did they over produce?

Ask the question again why was there an over production strictly in sour crude when the refineries of the west could not handle the volume that was being offerred?

Ask the question again why did the market dip when the US made their recent sells of sour crude when in fact the general product sour crude was running fairly stable---why the price dip which exactly matched the US sales period of their reserve sour crude?

You really need to start asking the question why---until you fill in the why answer in ---all other questions such as who what when where and how jet unanswered into space---answer the why and then the answers to the above questions make sense.