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

[Dayuhan]

And Dayuhan why was there a common word used during that period "oil cartel" and it was being led by the KSA so what motivated the KSA to flood the market if pricing went lower which would cut into their earnings as well?

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.