Trust me, it’s no accident that you are not benefiting from gas prices nearing 20-year lows. Because, if 95 percent of us were not under stay-at-home orders, prices would not be so.
In the wake of the March meeting, Saudi Arabia and Russia moved to boost production in order to retain market share amid falling global demand. …
Prices have recovered some ground since then. Last week, prices jumped 20% after US President Donald Trump said he expected Saudi Arabia and Russia to end their feud.
(BBC, April 9, 2020)
Except that this meeting that reportedly ignited their “feud” was actually a meeting to collude. What’s more, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) and Russia’s Vladimir Putin acted out their fake feud at virtually no cost to them. After all, the worldwide lockdown (i.e., shutdown of all non-essential businesses and stay-at-home orders) means that, instead of having to sell at “18-year lows,” they are storing much of that excess demand to sell when the lockdown ends — at a far more profitable price, naturally.
But anyone who knows anything about Putin’s role as de-facto godfather to wannabe dictators around the world should’ve known better. After all, here is how I presaged this very collusion just two years ago in “G20 Argentina: Forget the Tango between Trump and Xi and Putin…,” November 30, 2018.
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Putin and MbS consoled each other by schmoozing openly – complete with high fives like sports teammates celebrating an improbable victory. Hell, you’d think they flew all the way to Argentina just to bond as ‘blood brothers’ with a penchant for invading neighboring countries and ordering extraterritorial hits.
But they were clearly trying to show the world that, far from snubbing them, Trump was shamefacedly avoiding them. Indeed, no less a person than New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez tweeted that Putin and MbS were conveying
That feeling when you own the president of the United States and can do whatever you want.
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In this case, all they needed was for Trump to play along. He duly complied by getting US producers – not to store millions of barrels to sell at far more profitable prices, but to make them disappear. How?
President Donald Trump on Friday said he’s directed the U.S. Department of Energy to purchase crude oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an effort to support the battered energy sector. …
‘We’re going to fill it right up to the top, saving the American taxpayer billions and billions of dollars, helping our oil industry [and furthering] that wonderful goal — which we’ve achieved, which nobody thought was possible — of energy independence,’ [Trump said].
(CNBC, March 13, 2020)
Trump’s reasoning is idiotic of course. But it’s a tactic he’s all too familiar with. After all, suspicions prevail that the only reason any of his books ever became a bestseller is that Trump himself bought thousands of copies and buried them in a storage room somewhere.
But, as my title insinuates, Trump is far more venal than stupid. The point is that I suspect he secured some kind of kickback from this Putin-MbS scheme to enrich himself – the welfare of the country be damned.
Some of you might find this too cynical to be true. I’d only urge you to remember how solicitous he was to sellout America’s nuclear deterrence against North Korea just for the vainglory of a Nobel Peace Prize. No president interested in the general welfare of this country would have gone that far and sacrificed that much to pull off what amounted to nothing more than a self-aggrandizing stunt.
So yeah, gas is under $1 a gallon today. But it will be three times that by the time you are free to guzzle it up. Believe me!
But isn’t it funny how democratic capitalism keeps bearing fruit for strongman dictatorships in this era of Trump. Things that make you go, hmmm, no?
Related commentaries:
G20 Argentina…
North Korean nukes…
Trump out to enrich himself…
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