Oil Prices Are Plunging. Here’s Who Wins and Who Loses.
The reporting out of Vienna, where OPEC met, points to the cartel’s playing a long-term game in which it tries to obliterate some of its American competition by letting prices fall in the hope that some American producers go bankrupt.
.. Anybody who has fretted that years of money-printing by global central banks will create out-of-control inflation has some egg on his or her face right now. Plummeting prices for energy and other commodities are dragging down inflation to levels that are, if anything, too low.
The falling commodity prices are actually making these authorities’ jobs harder. The overwhelming urgency across the advanced world — in the eurozone, the United States and Japan — has been to try to get inflation higher, to reach the 2 percent annual target central banks in all three places have set.