Saudi Arabia Manipulated Oil Markets, Outsmarted Itself

[From article]
The economic devastation you see all around, as markets collapse, is due in no small part to the KSA's manipulations – manipulations that have throttled progress for decades.
However, the Saudis have made a major blunder this time. Technology is still making fracking cheaper. So a considerable number of frackers are waiting out the storm. Once the Saudis raise prices, American exploration will be back online quickly. The KSA is fighting a losing battle.
Worse yet, any increase in prices will also help Iran's budget. It seems the KSA is stuck at the bottom of the price graph, damned no matter what its monarch does.
In five years, the KSA's foreign reserves are expected to be emptied out. Already, the KSA is dropping internal subsidies on electricity and domestic gasoline. The local people are upset. Upset Muslims means violent revolution.



For over forty years, this blight of a tribe has caused recessions, caused depressions, and damaged the planet's economy. They got wealthy by re-impoverishing an emerging Third World, starting with the artificially created 1973 oil crisis. They have used their oil wealth to sponsor terrorism (as has Iran). Rather than investing wisely in industry to pick up market slack to become a modern diversified economy, they have invested instead in subsidizing mullahs, arming Salafist extremists in Syria, and exporting Islam around the world.
Now they have no options. Any increase in prices will restart American, European, and Chinese frackers. Failure to increase prices will bankrupt them. As a further blessing, we Americans will no longer have to hear the caterwauling idiocies of environmentalist Chicken Littles screaming about "peak oil."



What the USA can do is protect its fracking industry by severely taxing any oil imports under $50 a barrel. This may upset some free marketers, but the price of oil is rigged. We should rig it in our favor, and insulate ourselves from Saudi manipulations.
Good riddance to the KSA – a corrupt, vicious regime! May their next chief export be bottled camel urine. I wish America had never gotten involved with them.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/01/the_end_of_saudi_arabia.html

January 20, 2016
The End of Saudi Arabia?
By Mike Konrad