Instead, we monitored compliance to the agreed quotas. At the time of the March 2000 OPEC meeting, compliance was averaging around 75 percent, meaning that an additional 1.1 million barrels per day or so were being placed into the market outside the agreed quotas. Nonetheless, oil prices roughly had tripled. Now, these higher prices became a problem not just for consumers but for the exporters as well. The success of the oil exporting countries in cooperating to achieve higher oil prices is a lesson which is not being lost on the exporters, and I hope it is a lesson not lost on consumers as well.
Success breeds imitation, so it is said.
The United States is considered vulnerable because of our high and steadily rising dependence on foreign oil. At the same time, the oil exporters have a vulnerability of their own, and that is a dominating dependence on oil-derived revenues to fund their way of life. Few have diversified economies which might protect themselves during those times of low oil prices. Few have even tried to diversify. The scent of oil money is intoxicating, and for many their oil riches have proven both a curse and a blessing.