If your company had a surplus of 700,000 widgets that it had no market for, would it decide to slow production? Most would, especially if that surplus multiplied by 700,000 every day.
But what if continuing to produce the surplus hurt not only your firm's bottom line, but also threatened to bankrupt the competition? According to a report by Bloomberg Businessweek, that's the main reason OPEC is continuing to pump almost a million more barrels of oil each day than the world is using.
By producing surplus crude, OPEC is keeping oil prices lower than most of their member nations can afford, a move which threatens the budgets of countries like Russia, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Venezuela. The upside for OPEC? The oil glut also threatens to knock out U.S. shale-oil production.
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