BlastFromMyPast Part Un Revisited

After a very perceptive reader read my blog on the '82 price decline, he asked me about the 1986 price decrease to much lower levels and I realized that I may have conflated the numbers between '83 and '86. I wrote the piece way after my bedtime, and my enthusiasm may have exceeded my memory. Be that as it may, I do recall the Saudis being vexed about both the Iran Fao Peninsula campaign and the Afghan Mujahideen War, and perhaps these events may have contributed to diminishing the price.

But my interlocutor asked for inside baseball, and I can recall that I forecast in the early Fall that the Saudis would again lower production and manipulate prices to get GHWBush elected in November 1988. I can recall one oil industry expert remarking to me that I was the only oil writer to forecast the price decrease to about $10/barrel in '88 as being due to Saudi support for VP Bush's run at the presidency. I had been more or less corraborated in this forecast, if I remember correctly, by Nat Kern at Foreign Reports, though my own Saudi contacts in the Oil Ministry had let me know at an OPEC meeting that a price fall was in the cards.