Trump, OPEC, and the Oil Price Wars

On July 3, 2008, a barrel of crude oil sold for $145.29 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. At that moment, it was the most expensive barrel of oil in the entire history of human civilization. Eleven days later, the price nudged up to $147.27 — yet another record. By Christmas, it had cratered to $34. In barely five months, the most strategically vital commodity on Earth had lost more than three-quarters of its value.

Hold those three numbers in your head — $100, $147, $34 — because they form the skeleton of a story that, even now, hardly anyone has been properly told.

Oil is not an abstraction. Oil is the circulatory system of the global economy. It moves goods across oceans. It heats homes in winter. It makes fertilizer, which makes food. It’s baked into the price of virtually everything a human being buys, eats, wears, or uses to get to work in the morning. When the price of oil doubles, the cost of living rises for seven billion people. When it triples, governments topple, airlines collapse, and the world’s poorest are shoved from hardship into hunger.

This book argues that the conventional wisdom about oil prices is, at best, incomplete — and at worst, a convenient fiction.