Liam Denning, Columnist

Oil's Prize Fight: The Select Versus The Swarm

The cartel wants to raise prices, while everybody else slashes costs.

March 9, 2017 at 2:37 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

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I was only midway through the second day of a week-long energy conference when I heard the line that summed up the whole thing. Mohammad Barkindo, OPEC's secretary general, was on the stage sharing his organization's perspective on the U.S. shale boom:

He's right, of course: Revolutions can be so haphazard.