Good News for You SUV Owners!
From the leading Dutch business newspaper Het Financiële Dagblad comes a report about an encouragement pronouncement from current OPEC chairman Chakib Khelil (OPEC Chairman Khelil Sees Oil Price Sharply Falling).
According to Khelil, the price-per-barrel of over $140 that we recently saw for oil was “abnormal.” No, he calls for that price to head back down to around $78 per barrel, on two conditions: 1) That the dollar “keeps recovering” and that the political situation concerning Iran improves, as he told reporters recently in Jakarta. Current supplies of oil in the market are good, he said, and those extreme price-fluctuations we have seen lately in the market cannot simply be a result of supply-and-demand, but also other things – like the dollar’s weakness.
Now, there’s perhaps one fly in the ointment here. If you go to the OPEC website and check out their organization chart (PDF), you’ll see that, in fact, there exists no OPEC “chairman” per se. The closest I came to that after a little further on-line searching was a Chairman of the “Conference of the Organization of the [sic] Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC),” who at their meeting back in September of 2007 was HE Mohamed Bin Dhaen Al Hamli, Minister of Energy of the United Arab Emirates. HE Dr. Chakib Khelil was in fact at that time “Alternate President” of this “Conference,” but it seems that his usual day-job is rather that of Minister of Energy and Mines of Algeria.
Should that affect the credibility of his rosy pronouncements about where the price of oil is going? Here, I’m afraid, I’ll just report, so that you can just decide.
