Crying Time At OPEC? Price Crash Follows Cartel Punt on Production Quotas
Prices for U.S. domestic benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude on the CME NYMEX futures exchange crashed $7.54/Bbl to $66.15/Bbl Friday (November 28, 2014) - down 11 percent since the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and 38 percent since their recent high in late June. International benchmark Brent crude prices on the ICE futures exchange fell 10 percent to $70.02 /Bbl over the holiday and are down 39 percent since June. The underlying cause is oversupply but the short term trigger for last week’s nosedive was OPEC’s failure to respond to falling prices at their Thanksgiving meeting in Vienna by reining in production. Today we discuss the fate of crude prices after the OPEC meeting.