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The Brent oil price crashed back to earth last night after a very brief and violent short squeeze settling at $54.41. The major culprit was a resurgent US dollar so much of the move was technical but Kuwait gave it a shove, from Reuters:
Crude prices fell earlier when Kuwait Oil Minister Ali al-Omair said OPEC had to keep production steady in spite of a 50 percent price drop since the previous summer.
“We don’t want to lose our share in the market,” al-Omair said, reinforcing comments by OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia that members of the producer group aim to defend its market share against rival shale oil producers in the United States and other non-OPEC nations.
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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific's leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
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