Plummeting Oil Price: Near-prophetic Words of Sheikh Yamani
The price of oil is plummeting and it has lost its value almost by 50% of what it was a year ago, without a trace of an immediate reversal, despite the never-ending volatility in the Middle East, which used to push the price up in the past.
Those who think otherwise, while ignoring the strong facts that slowly contributed to the catastrophic culmination, are simply burying their heads in the sand, in the desert or elsewhere, in the hope of an onset of good old days by a miracle.
Up until November last year, investors, economists, and experts had been forecasting a healthy growth in the oil industry – and a steady increase in price too – based on mathematical models, over-optimistic growth charts of emerging economies and of course, matching rhetoric of the corresponding political circles.
Who on earth forecast a steep decline in oil price, let alone more than 50% drop in price, this time last year? I can’t think of anyone. Nor can anyone from our readership, I assume.
There was someone, however, who foresaw what we see now almost 15 years ago. Surprisingly, he was an Arab; a powerful oil minster too. It was Sheikh Yamani, the former Saudi oil minister who predicted a cataclysmic crash in the price of oil, in an interview in June, 2000, with Gyles Brandreth, a Member of Parliament in Britain, who was a columnist for the Telegraph newspaper too.
In the unprecedented interview, Sheikh Yamani said that within a few decades, vast reserves of oil would lie unwanted and “oil age” will come to an end.
Then, Sheikh Yamani, a Harvard-educated law graduate, went on elaborating what he really meant: "Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil - and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground,” said Sheik Yamani before going poetic to take Mr Brandreth, who by then may have been shell-shocked by the revelation, to the metaphorical zenith of his blunt prophesy: “The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil."
http://www.asiantribune.com/node/87610