Evolución de los precios del petróleo (West Texas Index) desde 1980 a la fecha
Quién lo hubiera
dicho; la movida de bajar artificialmente los precios del petróleo le termina
jugando en contra a los intereses de EEUU. Si alguien creía que la baja de los
precios tiene algo que ver con “el mercado”, que vaya corriendo a ver a un
analista. El “mercado” no tiene nada que ver con un bien escaso y precioso como
el petróleo (o el oro, o el uranio, o el agua, o tantas otras cosas). No
chicos: es la política, y si a la política la hacen esos aprendices de brujo,
los neocones, ya se sabe lo que termina pasando.
Acá van dos
notas: la primera, en castellano, es un resumen que hace Russia Today sobre una
nota de William Engdahl relativa a los precios del petróleo y sus
consecuencias. La segunda es la nota original de este autor para el New Eastern
Outlook. Acá van las dos:
Título: "Con
el complot del colapso de los precios del petróleo Washington cayó en su propia
trampa"
Texto: El plan de
EE.UU. para derrumbar los precios del petróleo en complicidad con Arabia
Saudita prácticamente ha significado una catástrofe para el propio país
norteamericano, asegura el analista geopolítico William Engdahl.
En su artículo
para el portal NEO, el doctor en Ciencias Políticas de la Universidad de
Princeton asegura que durante su visita a Riad en septiembre del 2014, el
secretario de Estado, John Kerry, propuso la repetición del escenario de 1986,
cuando un drástico incremento de extracción por parte de Arabia Saudita causó
una caída de los precios del crudo que hizo un gran daño a la economía de la URSS.
Esta vez la Casa
Blanca buscaba que el desplome de los precios, sumado a las sanciones
internacionales impuestas a Rusia, dejara a Moscú arrodillado.
Pero Washington
subestimó a su aliado árabe. El ministro de Petróleo saudita, Ali al-Naimi,
"vio en la propuesta de Kerry una oportunidad dorada de eliminar el
creciente desafío al mercado representado por el sector del crudo de pizarra de
EE.UU.".
Cuando el índice
WTI cayó a 46 dólares por barril en enero pasado, "Washington se dio
cuenta de que había caído en su propia trampa", subrayó Endahl.
La Reserva
Federal tuvo que comprar la deuda de compañías estadounidenses de dicho sector
a otros bancos en su afán por impedir un pánico en los mercados financieros.
Si la Reserva
sube su tasa de interés por primera vez en ocho años, según lo esperado en
septiembre, esto podría acabar con el excesivamente endeudado sector petrolero
de pizarra, concluye el analista.
***
Ahora pasemos al
artículo original de William Engdahl para el New Eastern Outlook:
Título: US’s
Saudi Oil Deal from Win-Win to Mega-Loose
Texto: Who
would’ve thought it would come to this? Certainly not the Obama Administration,
and their brilliant geo-political think-tank neo-conservative strategists. John
Kerry’s brilliant “win-win” proposal of last September during his September 11
Jeddah meeting with ailing Saudi King Abdullah was simple: Do a rerun of the
highly successful State Department-Saudi deal in 1986 when Washington persuaded
the Saudis to flood the world market at a time of over-supply in order to
collapse oil prices worldwide, a kind of “oil shock in reverse.” In 1986 was
successful in helping to break the back of a faltering Soviet Union highly
dependent on dollar oil export revenues for maintaining its grip on power.
So, though it was
not made public, Kerry and Abdullah agreed on September 11, 2014 that the
Saudis would use their oil muscle to bring Putin’s Russia to their knees today.
It seemed
brilliant at the time no doubt.
On the following
day, 12 September 2014, the US Treasury’s aptly-named Office of Terrorism and
Financial Intelligence, headed by Treasury Under-Secretary David S. Cohen,
announced new sanctions against Russia’s energy giants Gazprom, Gazprom Neft,
Lukoil, Surgutneftgas and Rosneft. It forbid US oil companies to participate
with the Russian companies in joint ventures for oil or gas offshore or in the
Arctic.
Then, just as the
ruble was rapidly falling and Russian major corporations were scrambling for
dollars for their year-end settlements, a collapse of world oil prices would
end Putin’s reign. That was clearly the thinking of the hollowed-out souls who
pass for statesmen in Washington today. Victoria Nuland was jubilant, praising
the precision new financial warfare weapon at David Cohen’s Treasury financial
terrorism unit.
In July, 2014
West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark price for US domestic oil pricing,
traded at $101 a barrel. The shale oil bonanza was booming, making the US into
a major oil player for the first time since the 1970’s.
When WTI hit $46
at the beginning of January this year, suddenly things looked different.
Washington realized they had shot themselves in the foot.
They realized
that the over-indebted US shale oil industry was about to collapse under the
falling oil price. Behind the scenes Washington and Wall Street colluded to
artificially stabilize what then was an impending chain-reaction bankruptcy
collapse in the US shale oil industry. As a result oil prices began a slow
rise, hitting $53 in February. The Wall Street and Washington propaganda mills
began talking about the end of falling oil prices. By May prices had crept up
to $62 and almost everyone was convinced oil recovery was in process. How wrong
they were.
Saudis not happy
Since that
September 11 Kerry-Abdullah meeting (curious date to pick, given the climate of
suspicion that the Bush family is covering up involvement of the Saudis in or
around the events of September 11, 2001), the Saudis have a new ageing King,
Absolute Monarch and Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman, replacing
the since deceased old ageing King, Abdullah. However, the Oil Minister remains
unchanged—79-year-old Ali al-Naimi. It was al-Naimi who reportedly saw the
golden opportunity in the Kerry proposal to use the chance to at the same time
kill off the growing market challenge from the rising output of the
unconventional USA shale oil industry. Al-Naimi has said repeatedly that he is
determined to eliminate the US shale oil “disturbance” to Saudi domination of
world oil markets.
Not only are the
Saudis unhappy with the US shale oil intrusion on their oily Kingdom. They are
more than upset with the recent deal the Obama Administration made with Iran
that will likely lead in several months to lifting Iran economic sanctions. In
fact the Saudis are beside themselves with rage against Washington, so much so
that they have openly admitted an alliance with arch foe, Israel, to combat
what they see as the Iran growing dominance in the region—in Syria, in Lebanon,
in Iraq.
This has all
added up to an iron Saudi determination, aided by close Gulf Arab allies, to
further crash oil prices until the expected wave of shale oil company
bankruptcies—that was halted in January by Washington and Wall Street manipulations—finishes
off the US shale oil competition. That day may come soon, but with unintended
consequences for the entire global financial system at a time such consequences
can ill be afforded.
According to a
recent report by Wall Street bank, Morgan Stanley, a major player in crude oil
markets, OPEC oil producers have been aggressively increasing oil supply on the
already glutted world market with no hint of a letup. In its report Morgan
Stanley noted with visible alarm, “OPEC has added 1.5 million barrels/day to
global supply in the last four months alone…the oil market is currently 800,000
barrels/day oversupplied. This suggests that the current oversupply in the oil
market is fully due to OPEC’s production increase since February alone.”
The Wall Street
bank report adds the disconcerting note, “We anticipated that OPEC would not
cut, but we didn’t foresee such a sharp increase.” In short, Washington has
completely lost its strategic leverage over Saudi Arabia, a Kingdom that had
been considered a Washington vassal ever since FDR’s deal to bring US oil
majors in on an exclusive basis in 1945.
That breakdown in
US-Saudi communication adds a new dimension to the recent June 18 high-level
visit to St. Petersburg by Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi Deputy Crown Prince
and Defense Minister and son of King Salman, to meet President Vladimir Putin.
The meeting was carefully prepared by both sides as the two discussed up to $10
billion of trade deals including Russian construction of peaceful nuclear power
reactors in the Kingdom and supplying of advanced Russian military equipment
and Saudi investment in Russia in agriculture, medicine, logistics, retail and
real estate. Saudi Arabia today is the world’s largest oil producer and Russia
a close second. A Saudi-Russian alliance on whatever level was hardly in the
strategy book of the Washington State Department planners.…Oh shit!
Now that OPEC oil
glut the Saudis have created has cracked the shaky US effort to push oil prices
back up. The price fall is being further fueled by fears that the Iran deal
will add even more to the glut, and that the world’s second largest oil
importer, China, may cut back imports or at least not increase them as their
economy slows down. The oil market time bomb detonated in the last week of
June. The US price of WTI oil went from $60 a barrel then, a level at which at
least many shale oil producers can stay afloat a bit longer, to $49 on July 29,
a drop of more than 18% in four weeks, tendency down.
Morgan Stanley
sounded loud alarm bells, stating that if the trend of recent weeks continues,
“this downturn would be more severe than that in 1986. As there was no sharp
downturn in the 15 years before that, the current downturn could be the worst
of the last 45+ years. If this were to be the case, there would be nothing in
our experience that would be a guide to the next phases of this cycle…In fact,
there may be nothing in analyzable history.”
‘October
Surprise’
October is the
next key point for bank decisions to roll-over US shale company loans or to
keep extending credit on the (until now) hope that prices will slowly recover.
If as strongly hinted, the Federal Reserve hikes US interest rates in September
for the first time in the eight years since the global financial crisis erupted
in the US real estate market in 2007, the highly-indebted US shale oil
producers face disaster of a new scale. Until the past few weeks the volume of
US shale oil production has remained at the maximum as shale producers
desperately try to maximize cash flow, ironically, laying the seeds of the oil
glut globally that will be their demise.
The reason US
shale oil companies have been able to continue in business since last November
and not declare bankruptcy is the ongoing Federal Reserve zero interest rate
policy that leads banks and other investors to look for higher interest rates
in the so-called “High Yield” bond market.
Back in the
1980’s when they were first created by Michael Millken and his fraudsters at
Drexel Burnham Lambert, Wall Street appropriately called them “junk bonds”
because when times got bad, like now for Shale companies, they turned into
junk. A recent UBS bank report states, “the overall High-Yield market has
doubled in size; sectors that witnessed more buoyant issuance in recent years,
like energy and metals mining, have seen debt outstanding triple or quadruple.”
Assuming that the
most recent downturn in WTI oil prices continues week after week into October,
there well could be a panic run to sell billions of dollars of those
High-Yield, high-risk junk bonds. As one investment analyst notes, “when the
retail crowd finally does head for the exits en masse, fund managers will be
forced to come face to face with illiquid secondary corporate credit markets
where a lack of market depth…has the potential to spark a fire sale.”
The problem is
that this time, unlike in 2008, the Federal Reserve has no room to act.
Interest rates are already near zero and the Fed has bought trillions of
dollars of bank bad debt to prevent a chain-reaction US bank panic.
One option that
is not being discussed at all in Washington would be for Congress to repeal the
disastrous 1913 Federal Reserve Act that gave control of our nation’s money to
a gang of private bankers, and to create a public National Bank, owned
completely by the United States Government, that could issue credit and sell
Federal debt without the intermediaries of corrupt Wall Street bankers as the
Constitution intended. At the same time they could completely nationalize the
six or seven “Too Big To Fail” banks behind the entire financial mess that is
destroying the foundations of the United States and by extension of the role of
the dollar as world reserve currency, of most of the world.
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