The New York Times has a thumbsucker piece on how well Saudi Arabia’s oil ministers are sleeping, despite the increasingly fragile state of global petro-politics.
Unlike the early 1980’s, when an overheated oil market collapsed as conservation kicked in an the US and Europe went looking outside the Middle East for oil, today, growing demand from China and India virtually guarantee that demand for oil will keep OPEC busy for years to come.
Plenty to read in the piece but the best bit is this piece of over-cooked prose:
“Gone are the militant years, when OPEC ministers barged into meetings and threatened to unsheathe their oil weapon only to discover, much too late, that it could be a double-edge sword.”
The thought of OPEC ministers unsheathing their oil weapons nearly made me choke on my coffee.