Oil and Iraq: The Latest

As the Sunni insurgency in Iraq gradually dies down, ethnic and religious conflicts tied to oil are becoming more central, as reported by Ben Lando at Iraqi Oil Report, http://www.iraqoilreport.com. The northern cities of Mosul, and especially Kirkuk, remain violent, flashpoints partly because the struggle between Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen for control, also involves control of a major oil producing center, with the Kurdish Regional Government already cutting its own separate oil deals with outside companies. Lando also reports that there is a move on now in southern Basra to vote on attaining autonomy, which would allow that region, where most of the rest of the oil is, to cut its own deals separate from the central government. Meanwhile the collapse of oil prices means the central government will probably go from running a budget surplus this year to a deficit, with cutbacks in reconstruction spending, although having been so far down, Iraq may be in better shape than other oil exporters, such as Russia, who needs $70 per barrel to balance its budget (and has had its stock market drop by 80% this year), or even Saudi Arabia who needs the now-too-high $40 per barrel, same price the oil companies reputedly have used to make their long term production investments.

Speaking of oil prices, this is an area where I was partly right, but did not go nearly far enough. So, in late spring, sometime after the price moved above $120 per barrel, I told a local TV station that it was looking like a speculative bubble, and the price could easily go down, "maybe even below $90 per barrel, although probably not below $70, and we will never see $2 per gallon for gas in the US again." Ooops! Wrong again. At least I recently talked a friend out of buying a six month forward contract on oil when it was at $53 per barrel, warning it could go as low as $25, which may yet also prove too high. But then, in 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression, after the great East Texas oil field was discovered, the price fell in a six month period from about $1 per barrel to about 5 cents. A similar drop now would take it down to a bit over $7 per barrel from the peak of $147 in July, but then I am not expecting a find of an easy to pump oil field on the magnitude of the now largely depleted East Texas one.



Hidden conclusion here.