Oil Plunging

Oil prices continued their decline for the eighth straight week. Brent crude closed at $42.62 a barrel today. Serious concerns over China’s slowing economy on top of the saturated crude oil market are causing the current downturn with no signs of reversal anytime soon. Even geopolitical factors, including armed conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, which would have normally kept the prices high, are having limited impact on the market.

Since late 2014, oil prices dropped by 60 percent, creating fiscal crisis for petrostates whose foreign exchange earnings mainly come from the oil sector.