Commodity prices, a barometer of excessive money creation, are depressed, except for OPEC-manipulated oil.
The US, in particular, has been trying to apply pressure to Opec to modify any output cuts.
World output inched up to 86 million bpd a year ago only by dint of spigot-opening by OPEC.
In fact, it's about five percent of daily output of all the OPEC producing countries.
And in fact, there has been a lot of cooperation recently between OPEC and Russia.
And bear in mind that the OPEC countries produce about 40 percent of global oil.
Other Investor Team members agreed that recent OPEC cuts weren't enough to combat the lousy economy.
They had and have an incentive to lie, to support a larger OPEC quota.
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Inventories, which were temporarily in surplus, have tightened due to an OPEC production cutback.
Persuading all OPEC nations to go along would establish a floor under oil prices.
New oil is coming from almost everywhere, a mix of big and small, OPEC and non-OPEC.
Non-OPEC supply jumped from 27 to 41 million barrels per day in response to the embargo.
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Russia, the world's biggest producer but not an OPEC member, sets its own agenda.
OPEC's new president, then the cartel will cut production by 500, 000 barrels a day.
But with Iran in collapse his country has become, after Saudi Arabia, OPEC's second-largest oil producer.
Plenty has been said, much unproductive, about the challenges and realities of OPEC oil.
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Non-OPEC supplies, which have grown in recent years, may start to decline in 2012.
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Tulis, 66, has been covering the sector ever since the first OPEC embargo 31 years ago.
Political tension and partisan bickering were off-the-charts then (Nixon, Vietnam, OPEC), just as now.
The OPEC meeting this week in Vienna reportedly produced no quota changes on production.
Gignoux said OPEC is "trailing balloons" in an effort to reach a consensus among its members.
At the same time, OPEC did not continue to invest in bringing new fields online.
They can bully their neighbors, their friends in OPEC, into having something like a discipline.
The Guards also have full representation at the United Nations, OPEC and other international bodies.
Choking off demand in the importing countries has largely lost its allure for many OPEC producers.
The weaker oil price in the 1990s partly reflected a weakening of OPEC's bargaining power.
That's because non-OPEC producers pumped more valuable light crude to counteract the effects of OPEC's cheating.
And reports of lower-than-expected production from non-OPEC countries are only further exacerbating the market's distress.
The rise was caused by a successful campaign by Opec to restrict their output.
When OPEC last cut production, early in 2007, prices doubled in just over a year.
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