Saudi Arabia's King told a Kuwaiti newspaper (Al-Seyassah) the price of oil should be $75 a barrel, much higher than it is now. Oil Minister Ali Naimi says OPEC will "do what needs to be done" to shore up falling oil prices.
The fear is that if nothing is done, that the $10 per barrel scenario could play out again. Throughout the oil producing world, the momentous collapse in oil prices from $147 per barrel to less than $50 is causing fundamental problems with the petro-economies and may ultimately lead to schism's within their social fabric.
"As long as the oil and gas money is flowing, that gives the Russian government the wherewithal to keep living standards rising," says Steven Pifer, a former State Department official who is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "So when the oil and gas revenues decline, that does raise questions about what the government can do."
The largest bank in the United Arab Emirates, NBD Bank, is so nervous about a property crash that it recently told staff not to grant mortgages to expatriates working for property firms. No wonder the latest joke doing the rounds among expats is: “I knew Dubai wanted to be No 1 in everything. I just didn’t realise that included the No1 boom and bust.”
Crude producer Iran said on Sunday that the world oil market is oversupplied by two million barrels a day after OPEC decided to leave its oil output quota unchanged amid falling prices.
"There is oversupply of two million barrels per day on the market and we are seeking to create a balance between demand and supply," Oil Minister Gholam Hossein Nozari told reporters.
This situation could lead to further destabilisation of the region should the price per barrel continue to drop radically. Iran has to finance its nuclear programme, Dubai, its ambitious new megacities and Russia is looking to maintain stability and to reclaim its former crown of superpower.
Russia may well be the main instigator of the higher oil price. There is a correlation between the Presidential ambition of Vladimir Putin and the stability of Mother Russia's economy. His strength and popularity lay not with the city elites but in small towns amongst Russia's previously forgotten. How else would he have been able to take away the power of democratically elected local assemblies for the autocracy of centralised control in Moscow.
Its international relationships are strong with the Axis of Evil. Russia is a major trading partner of Syria and Iran, providing them with state of the art weapons systems. Just last week, Medvedev was in Venezuela with Hugo Chavez overseeing joint naval exercises. The US policy of treating Russia like a pariah has only made it act like one.
This may well be to the cost of the price of oil and liquified natural gas. As aforementioned, even the Saudi's who are strongly pro-Western are calling for cuts aimed to push the oil price up to $75 per barrel. That may well be the best case scenario as the OPEC nations look to use the blunt weapon of higher oil prices to protect them from the credit crunch and depression. However, when considering that present oil inventories are enough to cover 56 days’ supply as opposed to more normal levels of 52 days, then it would take a sizeable cut over a long period of time to get back to the average level.
$75 per barrel also bodes well for gold. There is a strong correlation between gold and oil and a 50% rise in the oil price could be positive for bullion and encourage weakness in the US$. It is also entirely possible that the price per barrel could rise without OPEC having to close the spigot. Dollar weakness due to the Fed's printing of US$ to reflate the US economy could also push the price of oil up, as it becomes more expensive to buy. In conclusion, oil at these levels may be presenting an investment opportunity unseen for a number of years.
My worry, is that there may be a confluence of factors to hurt the global economy. A combination of a more aggressive, assertive OPEC + Russia and then the trickledown effect of TARP, weakening the dollar by the sheer bulk of Fed printed paper.
If that is the case and if banks are still not lending in 2009, expect the dollar to hurtle toward ¥80 and to retrace back to US$2.00 against Sterling.
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