The roller coaster ride for oil and gas prices that has lasted for most of 2018 continues. Just a month after the price of crude oil reached a four-year high, it has now fallen to a seven-month low. As of late Wednesday, crude was trading at slightly above $61 a barrel.
The ostensible reason for the recent decline is increased supply worldwide, but oil market analyst Phil Flynn with Price Futures Group says the credit (or blame) goes to the White House. "President Trump kind of hoodwinked the oil producers," says Flynn. "Basically telling OPEC that we were going to put these very strict sanctions on Iran, and then at the last minute he changed his mind and granted waivers to a lot of the buyers of U.S. oil."
Flynn tells KTRH that the president used the renewed Iran sanctions to manipulate the global oil market. "(Trump) really told U.S. energy producers to produce as much oil as you can because we're going to need it, and then all of a sudden he pulled out of this tough sanction talk, granted a few exceptions, and created a price collapse," says Flynn. "He really did engineer this price crash in the cost of oil, and you've got to hand it to him, he really got oil to dip into a bear market."
Nevertheless, the oil price roller coaster may be nearing its next climb. "It is rumored that (OPEC) could announce as much as a 1.4-million barrel production cut this weekend," says Flynn. "OPEC isn't happy about this price drop, and they're going to try to do something about it."