This from Tom Doggett and Chris Baltimore at Reuters:

WASHINGTON – OPEC President Edmund Daukoru said on Friday that the global oil market is “oversupplied” by about 2 million barrels per day.

“The market is indeed well supplied with crude today,” Daukoru told an audience at the National Press Club in Washington, ahead of next week’s meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Daukoru’s view that the global market has plenty of crude oil differed with that of the United States, the world’s biggest oil consuming nation, which believes the market needs more oil.

This is quite disturbing. Absent the undue influence of Governments, “Market Makers”, and powerful cartels, the free market doesn’t lie. And the market tells us there is no surplus in crude production. Over the past two decades, we’ve been blessed with the fact of OPEC’s waning power. And there were always producers (mostly Saudi) willing to increase production to counter the actions of other nations, who wanted to launch the market into an inflationary spiral. However, the expansion of the “emerging economies” (most notably India and China) has tapped the world’s surplus capacity. Ladies and gentlemen, hold on to your hats; it’s quite likely to be a bumpy ride.