Mar 26 2020 20 mins 25
The Duran Quick Take: Episode 510. The Duran’s Alex Christoforou and Editor-in-Chief Alexander Mercouris discuss how Saudi Arabia's oil price war is bringing the Kingdom to its knees. OilPrice.com reports (https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Saudi-Arabias-Oil-Price-War-Is-Backfiring.html ) At $30 a Brent barrel, the Saudi wealth fund will deplete fast and reduced government spending will stall projects, and the already suffering private non-oil sector will suffer further. That’s the near-term damage. The longer-term damage is the lack of funds for the ambitious Vision 2030 plan of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, which was already going downhill even before the oil price collapse as the promised multibillion foreign investment and Saudi investment in “diversifying away from oil” weren’t exactly flowing to the Kingdom. “I think we are beginning to see that the vision 2030 is not going well,” Jean-François Seznec, Non-Resident Senior Fellow at Atlantic Council, said on an Atlantic Council press call last week. There is a growing amount of tension among the population, even among the crown prince’s main supporters, Seznec said. “But he needs to make a big impact. Now, his big impact is to force the Russians to give up and agree to the cuts, and if at the same time it destroys the U.S. shale industry so much the better,” Seznec noted.
