Rigzone reports that “Concluding the highly anticipated 168th meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the group took the bold move of essentially doing nothing.”  

Bloomberg  adds: “OPEC has abandoned all pretense of acting as a cartel. It’s now every member for itself.”  

At a chaotic meeting Friday in Vienna that was expected to last four hours but extended to nearly seven, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries tossed aside the idea of limiting production to control prices. Instead, it went all in for the 1-year-old Saudi Arabia-led policy of pumping, pumping, pumping until rivals — external, such as Russia and U.S. shale drillers, as well as internal — are squeezed out of market share.  

“’Lots of people said that OPEC was dead; OPEC itself just confirmed it,’ Jamie Webster, a Washington-based oil analyst for IHS Inc., said in Vienna.”