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It looks like the reverse; OPEC stopped holding prices up.

• hga 12y ago
  Indeed. The theory here is that besides a demand drop due to the general world economy, and the US swimming in oil, the Saudis have decided to stop playing the swing producer game because they've noticed when they tighten the spigot, they permanently lose market share. The current US inventory issue is akin to this, because it exists in part because refineries are tuned to the types of oil they use, and we've spent quite a bit making a lot of them take heavy, sour crude, and fracking tends to produce light, sweet crude. Which is good stuff, and in high world wide demand, but due to another one of those insane '70s energy policies, no one is allowed to export crude (with I think one exception, to refineries that immediately return the distillates to the US). E.g. we should have exported a lot of Alaskan oil to Japan, when California was not set up to take all of it, and it would have cost less to transport it to Japan and equivalent oil to the US.