Kemp: Saudi Oil Policy Needs Better Communications
He went on to complain "You want something that we haven't done yet. You want to cause disturbance in the market. The way you ask questions about price, about production, about supply, what you do is become an agent of disturbance in the market."
Modernised Communications
There is nothing new about rumour and speculation filling the vacuum of real information about Saudi policy. In April 1986, the legendary New York Times columnist and former presidential speechwriter William Safire believed Saudi Arabia was deliberately crashing prices to harm Iran.
"My strategy is to produce and produce until the low prices bankrupt Iran," Safire imagined Yamani saying ("Thinking Along with Yamani" April 2, 1986).
"Break Iran," Safire went on. "The Persian menace is the single over-riding threat to the Arab world ... With our very survival at stake, we are willing to suffer these falling prices because we know we are starving Iran's war machine."
Yamani later told his biographer that the imagined conversation had no basis in fact, and was just a bit of "journalistic wishful thinking," a neoconservative pipedream.
More recently, some commentators have been reprising those earlier arguments, suggested Saudi Arabia is again content to see lower oil prices because it harms strategic rivals like Iran and Russia, or because it will put U.S. shale producers out of business.
These theories seem to have no more basis in fact than Safire's armchair geopolitical strategising did almost 30 years ago.
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