No Thanks to OPEC

 

Thirty years later, they got it wrong again. You would think that they are students of history, with their Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Yale degrees. You would think that they wouldn't have done what they did in the 1970s, with their consultants from London, Houston, Manhattan, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

But they did it again, thirty years later. They took their spigots of beautiful cash that fountain from the desert, and turned this ATM into a limping dinosaur that barely will supply their countries' social safety nets.

In the Western world, we have another recession underway. In many OPEC countries, they will see great depressions.

Was it arrogance? Greed? A chance for OPEC to show us westerners who will swing the big mack in the future?

Whatever it was, OPEC, your best-laid plans didn't work. You chose to ignore what was good for your customers – maybe oil at $85 per barrel, say? – and you drove them out of business.

You are a bad Mafia, OPEC, the crew that the Capo does not respect. You are an untrained loan shark, and you squeezed the little guy too hard.

Ah, but the laughter. The sublime irony that the West will enjoy… at least through our current tears.

At $85 oil, OPEC, you could have owned the world in two decades. At $140 oil, you crashed your own investments in Fannie and Freddie paper, the US stock market, and American and European property. All of which is also crashing the property values in your slice of the world. Worse, you awoke the sleeping giant, you elected Barrack Obama, and oil consumption will never be the same again.

Maybe it was great fun to think about Americans paying for $140 oil. Maybe you laughed after the American President not only warned you about this, but actually – and without precedent – pleaded for relief. Maybe you didn't see the foreclosure signs around Stockton, California, where common folks struggling to pay their mortgage were suddenly hit with $500 per month gasoline bills.

You did it all, kid. You may have wounded us, but you crashed your own plane in the process. Our pain is deep. Your pain will be far greater and far longer.