Vienna Short-Term Greed

Remember several weeks ago when oil was still trading around $75 a barrel, and OPEC was deciding upon a Production cut and Russia and Mexico went to Vienna and a deal was being discussed regarding a combined production cut so that Saudi Arabia wouldn't have to take the brunt of the cut by themselves? Looking back this has to be one of the most shortsighted business decisions of recent history, and ironically it will end up costing them more money and doing more harm to their countries balance sheets than losing a little market share to the US shale Industry for a couple years until it runs its course.

Let`s Have A Price War!

I get the simple reasoning, there is a lot of that going on these days. In fact most of Wall Street and Modern Financial theory lacks sophisticated logical reasoning found in other disciplines like Philosophy, Technology & Science. So the simple reasoning by the OPEC decision not to cut production is that “Why should we be the ones to cut production and possibly lose more market share to the US Shale Industry”? Why not talk down price, give the speculators more fuel to work and pressure prices further causing the US Shale players to cut back production, or go out of business entirely, and then they( mainly the Saudi`s who have the lowest production costs) can gain market share after the short term inevitable pain (however long that ends up being).

Sophisticated Cost Benefit Analysis

There are a couple of reasons why this strategy is not the best strategy they could have chosen, first of all the US is a diversified economy, sure the Shale Industry will be hurt with lower oil prices, some of it may even go out of business, or be bought up by larger companies in the US. However, the rest of the United States is going to benefit from lower fuel costs, and the US economy as a whole is going to better off from lower oil and fuel prices and flourish. Whereas the OPEC countries are not diversified, their main source of revenue is oil, so not only do they get lower revenue from lower oil prices; but this just doesn`t hurt their budgets, their balance of trade, or the oil sector of the economies, it hurts their stock market, it hurts their financial sectors, in short every part of their economy is affected from building and real estate stocks to restaurants and the entire supply chain that relies upon healthy oil prices to fuel its economy. Most of these countries subsidize fuel so the consumer in these countries doesn't really even benefit that much with lower fuel costs as a result of the drop in oil prices like net consumer nations.