Replies

Thats fine. OPEC is not a particularly relevant organization in any case. Iraq's presence at the meeting is of some value, its always good to schmooze your counterparts in your primary business, but no one should ever imagine that OPEC is going to do anything important.

OPEC is a club for bankrupt centralized economies. All of them are on the edge of disaster economically, all of them are trying to increase production while simultaneously trying to convince their colleagues to restrain theirs. They agree to production cuts they don't intend to honor. Real production cuts are usually announced to cover maintenance problems, and usually disappear when the situation returns to normal.

OPEC can not manage more than temporary spikes in the price of oil without losing market share, particularly in a world where the largest untapped sources of oil lie in non-OPEC countries.

The only way for them to restrain production without losing market share is to seed terrorism in non-OPEC countries. There is some evidence that at least one OPEC country is engaged in this, which leads to a chicken-egg question. Is Wahab subversion in Central Asia motivated purely by toxic religious psychosis, with the oil reserves being merely a coincidental issue, or is it one of those delicious situations in which you can pursue your strategic economic needs while spreading your ideology and influence?

That one OPEC country should be viewed as a Pirate Kingdom. The rest are economic illiterates.