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Comment by retube | Hacker News Reader

Sorry but that's nonsense. It's a well known and indeed publically admitted strategy by the Saudi's to drive US shale producers out of business. Google "saudia arabia united states oil price" for many authoritive hits on the subject.

Russia was collateral damage.

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Why not both? Gives a better reason for the Saudi's to go along with the plan. They help the US political side and get paid in political good will and getting to damage the US competitors.

because we don't care that much about Russia. This isn't the 80's.

OPEC got greedy, that created room for shale, and Russia got hurt.

Hello, there's a fairly warm little proxy war going down right now in Ukraine and an increase in Russian forces in Syria. The 80's were the nice hopeful bit.

yes, those were the days when Russia could at least hope they would win a war with us

You can google "Russia united stated oil price" and find authoritative hits supporting the other argument.

Whether intentional or not, Russia's economy is something like 40% oil and gas so the effect was certainly severe.

A bit of both. I wouldn't characterize as being quite so malicious, but it's business for sure. The Saudi's need to maintain market share, even if they are selling it cheaper. They're banking on the price going back up, and if it does and the world has switched to US suppliers, then they're out even more.

But there's another country they're looking to disrupt, one who's primary source of income is through oil sales due to sanctions. Their biggest enemy.

Iran.

Figure it this way, Obama killed two birds with one stone.

From my understanding the dump was started from financial companies that had loads of oil sitting around in tankers and the Saudis then followed and met the price, but didn't set it.

Come on, are all those US shale producers really that dumb? they knew that if they started flooding the market they just wouldn't be able to compete, the U.S doesn't care much about all those small shale producers when it has bigger fish to fry.

"Small Shale Producers?"

We're talking about 49% of total US crude oil production.

http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=847&t=6

"Small Shale Producers" are the ones that go out of business, of course, the big ones can hold up.

The small ones aren't the ones with any political clout.

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