Historian Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of research firm IHS Markit, said last week the combination of an oil price war led by Saudi Arabia and Russia and a coronavirus pandemic is unlike anything in the history of the oil industry. Yergin told reporters March 12 in Washington, D.C., “There have been many cases of an oil market collapse and competition for market share, but I don’t think of any one that was in the context of a larger global epidemic. Normally demand would solve the problem, but not in this case because of the freezing up of economic activity… There’s so much oil out there flooding into the market. It’s a problem of an oil price war in the middle of a constricting market.”
