It has been an unprecedented movement. The United States, China, Japan, India, South Korea, and Britain has opened its strategic oil reserves. And the price has risen a dollar. The measure was discounted by the market and, in addition, has been considered insufficient by operators. In fact, the 50 million barrels that the US has put on the market Iran, for the most part, simply filling the stocks of the refineries of that country.
Perhaps the best example of that failure - and of the rise in prices - is that the chain of discount stores from the United States 'Dollar Tree', famous because everything that has for sale on the shelves costs a dollar, VA to raise the prices of most products that sells a dollar and 25 cents. It is as if the stores 'everything to a Euro' of Spain decided that, from now on, everything is going to be at 1.25 euros.
The fact that this massive intervention in the oil market has not had the slightest impact does not predict anything good for inflation or for governments that, such as that of the US, are being subjected to increasing political pressure to contain the rise of prices. Gasoline and heating diesel are at its maximum of seven years in the US.
Never in history, States had released both oil. The US is injecting a record number, superior to that of its greatest interventions, which took place thirty years ago, during the occupation of Kuwait by Iraq, and ten, when NATO intervened in the Libyan civil war. There is, in addition, another factor: this time it is a coordinated intervention of six countries, including the four largest oil consumers: USA, China, Japan, and South Korea. No EU country has participated.
The release of strategic oil reserves is a relatively common strategy to force the price down. Only the US has 754 million barrels in underground caverns in the Gulf of Mexico region, where its refineries are concentrated, to deal with supply crisis or billy conflicts. That is about 35 days of consumption.
Until now, the White House had succeeded in controlling the rise in the price of oil by simply managing expectations and threatening to intervene. Thus, he had been giving us to understand that he would intervene, and, a few days ago, he announced an investigation to determine if the big oil companies collude in maintaining the price at the service stations artificially high. Paradoxically, it has been to move from the words to the facts and stop slowing down the price rebound.
Yesterday, the Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, president of the Environment Subcommittee of the House of Representatives, threatened the prohibition of oil exports by the US, a controversial measure, which according to some will not impact the price, given that the value of oil is fixed in the international market. In the United States, the export of oil was banned since the first oil crisis hit the country at the beginning of the 70s until recently under a decade, when the increase in raw production due to the rise of fracking allowed that country to produce Oil above its demand.
Date Of Update: 25 November 2021, 01:08
