Monday, August 01, 2005

the king is dead, long live the king

Oil hits record as Saudi king dies
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices shot to a record above $62 a barrel on Monday as the death of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, U.S. refinery outages and tensions over Iran's nuclear ambitions rattled the market.
...
Crown Prince Abdullah, who is Fahd's half brother and has been Saudi Arabia's de facto leader since Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995, was swiftly pronounced monarch of the world's largest oil exporter after Fahd died on Monday.

Oil prices can hardly be described as "shooting" to $62+ a barrel - more like dribbling to same. Given that oil should be priced at $100 a barrel, just so people stop taking it for granted, I would say the prices were remarkably stable today.

Meanwhile, the acting King, 82 years of age, is now the King of record. This is fine. As long as there is no coup. Civil war in Saudi is the last thing we need.

2 Comments:

At 11:44 PM, August 01, 2005, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Given that oil should be priced at $100 a barrel, just so people stop taking it for granted, I would say the prices were remarkably stable today."

I reakon the price of oil should be relative to how "developed" the nation is. The more "developed", the higher the price. This would give developing nations access to oil, hopefully to become developed, while putting pressure on oil wasters, i.e. the developed nations.

Though, this has probably already been thought of before.

 
At 10:37 AM, August 02, 2005, Blogger JMS said...

Well, price fixing is troublesome to pull off. Fixing it up now might be more effective than trying to fix it down later, on a number of levels.

Just ask Nixon.

 

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