Holman Jenkins : “Speculating about counterfactuals can be a foolish exercise, but oil traders usually take fright at geopolitical upsets that threaten supplies out of the Middle East… A huge amount of surplus production is already sloshing around the world, mostly as a result of U.S. fracking. As a consequence, storage tanks are full to overflowing. Panickers and speculators may well be physically unable to drive up prices significantly if they wanted to.”  

“Fracking overnight has relieved Saudi Arabia of its swing-producer dominance. Fracking overnight has relegated the Middle East to a sideshow, albeit a still-important sideshow, in the world economy.”