Oil to $380/Barrel?

This is includes SA’s capacity numbers. The public number is kept very vague to stabilize oil prices at higher levels. We do not know their actual capacity numbers. If you expect to invest on what the Kingdom tells you remember you are being lied to in all likelihood.

That reminds me of the book “Twilight in the Desert”, which is an excellent book that I recommend to everyone. Especially if investing in oil. The premise of the book is that Saudi Arabia is starting to run out of oil and the impact that is going to have world-wide. (The book was premature in its assessment of SA, but perhaps that is coming true now?).

Aside from the prediction of a drop in output the book is chock full of super interesting stuff about getting petroleum out of the ground. How it is found, how it is removed, how the process of removal can increase or decrease the total amount that can be extracted (versus the total amount of what is there).

The part of the book that meshed with the above is how everyone knows that export quotas are set, and then ignored. But Wall Street believed they had figured out how, so markets pretty much “worked” anyway. Then OPEC decided to stop fudging the numbers and report accurately, which threw all the Wall Street models into haywire and the markets no longer knew what to think. I believe oil crashed as a result. It was not too long after that OPEC went back to their normal behavior and Wall Street settled down…

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