Just leaving a conference in Dubai, and thinking about oil prices. (A lot of the conference was actually about geopolitics, and I don’twant to think about the quite grim stuff from that end.) So, some not especially organized notes.
One involves the failure of OPEC to restrict production to support prices. I guess I wonder why anyone thought that was likely. My understanding has always been that when people say OPEC, the subtitle reads “Saudi Arabia”, which is the only player that has ever done much to restrict output to sustain prices. And Saudi Arabia only accounts for about 13 percent of world production, which gives it limited power even given inelastic demand (especially because unconventional oil supply is probably quite price-elastic, further reducing Saudi market power.)
Also, consider the precedents: the last time there was anything like the recent oil glut, namely back in the 1980s, even drastic cuts in Saudi production, shown in the accompanying figure, weren’t enough; eventually the Saudis gave up, and prices crashed, so why should they go through that again?
My other thought is that Venezuela-with-nukes (Russia) keeps looking more vulnerable to crisis. Long-term interest rates at almost 13 percent, a plunging currency, and a lot of private-sector institutions with large foreign-currency debts. You might imagine that large foreign exchange reserves would allow the government to bail out those in trouble, but the markets evidently don’t think so. This is starting to look very serious.
And now the joy of trying to sleep on a very long flight.
Paul Krugman’s Blog (USA)
