Here’s an interesting piece on the inevitable failure of libertarian delusions of grandeur
http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/on-the-high-seas-of-the-hidden-internet/
Depending on your point of view, the root cause of the oil crash is:
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OPEC suddenly and unexpected deciding “To hell with it, fracking/shale oil must become unprofitable to exploit!” and massively bumping up production. There are also a slew of internal politicking in the cartel that I wouldn’t like to try and decipher - but it looks like one result will be weakening Iran’s position and strengthening the Saudi’s (although, this was from things I read a while ago and may have gotten the names of the guilty confused). America’s role in this is largely benefiting from gas prices going down. Hurray oil!
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Vague conspiracies involving mutually beneficial arrangements for the US and OPEC to wage an economic war on Russia, sparked partly because of the invasion-that-totally-isn’t-happening guys. It is having the effect of massively weakening Russia’s economy. (Although RT would have you believe lower oil/energy prices are definitely GOOD for Russia! Ignore that starving children in the background. They just don’t want to eat. They could.)
I think 1) is probably more accurate, and 2) is a benefit. Basically this is a way to squeeze out the competition. As for why people didn’t see this coming…most economists aren’t good at predicting outcomes. What they’re predictions are good for is predicting what other economists think will happen. The world of economics is governed by heavy tailed probability distributions but modeled with the normal distribution (increasingly, with a mutated/mutilated form of it, but still, ultimately, flawed). This was largely why the 2008/9 crash was so “unexpected” and “unpredictable”. People actually worth their salt (Nassim Taleb, annoying as he is) were predicting it, and with good cause.
I think you’ve basically got the supply side of the equation down. It’s not that OPEC is pumping more necessarily, just that they aren’t reducing production to match the new supply sources in North America. That begin said, global refining capacity hasn’t really grown nearly as much as crude production has…so I think the demand side is at least equally important.
As an analyst in China, we’d often talk about the “marginal Chinese price”. This essentially means that China’s huge growth has been fueled by imports of raw materials, because they don’t nearly have enough sources of most raw materials whether it’s oil or iron (the exception is coal, they have a fuck ton of coal). Thus, you’ve had a huge run up in commodity prices as China is willing to pay basically any price for new oil or iron. Thus, if you were a steel mill or oil refinery in Europe or the US, you’d have to pay what the marginal Chinese consumer was willing to pay, otherwise your supplier would just export to China and get a higher price. I think that chinese demand has really fallen more than most people think. Commodity future prices have baked in assumptions of much higher future Chinese growth than is actually playing out now, and thus commodity prices have nearly across the board come down. It’s not just oil, but metals, plastics, and other products as well.