The Political Inquirer

Somehow I never thought of this (From the Angry Economist):

First is that there are sources of huge amounts of oil which are not profitable to extract when the Saudis are dumping oil. Second is that nobody is going to invest in these oil sources unless it looks like they can successfully sell their oil. So they’re not going to act simply because the price of oil is high. Everybody expects the Saudis to try to push the price of oil up to extract the maximum possible profit.

But if the Saudis are artificially restricting the supply of oil, they can artificially expand it as well. The people sitting on more expensive oil are going to wait to extract it until they’re sure that the Saudis can’t screw them by expanding production. (Emphasis mine)

Is that genius or what? I have never had the thought cross my mind that the Saudis can expand production and mess up the operations of new oil drilling. Maybe I’ve read it before and it just never connected. Either way, it’s definitely the “thing to learn” for today.