The OPEC "Haves" And "Have-Nots" -- June 15, 2016

To post or not to post. To add to an earlier post or make it a new stand-alone post. Whatever. Here goes.

This is the top story over at Yahoo!Finance right now: OPEC's chasm of doom. The oil cartel's have-nots get ever-smaller pieces of a shrinking pie.

This gets back to the argument/discussion we had back in early 2015: was Saudi's surge to a) crush the US shale industry; or, b) crush its "partners" within OPEC? (It was probably a little of both.) [Later: see first comment -- when one's very existence is at stake, it doesn't matter which market share Saudi went after.]

That might make a good case study or a great book or a nice op-ed piece, but for many, what matters is a) what the outcome was; and, b) where "we" are headed.

The author at the linked Bloomberg article takes a look at where "they" are headed, the "they" being the OPEC have-nots. I haven't read the article, so let me guess who the OPEC have-nots are. I assume most of them are in Africa; the question is whether Venezuela is now considered a "have-not."

So, let's see:

The estimate for this year, $337 billion in real terms, is barely a third of 2012's peak -- and, uncannily, exactly the same as the consensus forecast for the combined revenue of Exxon Mobil and Chevron in 2016. Of course, those two only have to pay their employees, creditors and shareholders. OPEC's members have about 700 million people to answer to, roughly double the amount in 1980. So, on a per capita basis, those numbers look worse.

What really stands out from that chart isn't just that net oil exports are set to generate less than $500 per man, woman and child this year. It's that even when oil was trading in triple digits a few years ago, the export revenue per person was still less than half what it was at the beginning of the 1980s. The need to diversify away from oil, such as Saudi Arabia is touting, reflects not just an acute crisis but a long-festering, chronic economic condition.

So, who is suffering, who are the "have-nots":

• Nigeria

And that was it. It seems a lot was missing.

And yes there was. Yahoo!Finance did a lousy job of providing a Reader's Digest version of the original Bloomberg article. Here's the link to that article.

So, now the "list":

That footnote is not trivial.