混乱和崩溃的油价正在中东剧焦虑

“我们非常焦虑，”阿拉伯联合酋长国高级官员告诉我一杯热味的薄荷茶。“中东是着火的，”他说，穿过北湾的绿松石水域，“但石油价格落下。”

忧虑珠子在温暖海域的浅水区锻炼伊朗人称波斯湾和阿拉伯人当然叫阿拉伯海湾。阿拉伯语有99个细分MISBAHA., normally used to count out the names of God. But these days the four big anxiety-inducing beads on the string are the ISIS, Iran, Barack Obama and Brent.

我应该补充说，希腊语变种的珠子珠子上有较少的珠子，称为aKombolói., which John Negroponte always carried around with him as ambassador to Iraq and then as director of National Intelligence (when he was my boss). “It’s a useful diplomatic device,” he told me once. “It gives me more time to think in a negotiation.” The number of segments on aKombolói.is typically a prime number, usually 17, 19 or 23 — Go ponder that, all you quants.

在黎巴嫩通过伊拉克的中东的混乱通过伊拉克被全球宏贸易商视为多元回归中的一个变量，其依赖变量是石油价格。海湾的埃马尔，国王和国王的称重将混乱作为一个变量在更短的等式中，其终点是他们自己的生存。他们的等式还为出口和收入的出口和收入的唯一来源（除天然气除外）以及在危险世界中莫利来的基金的井铺分配了大量的石油。在几个月内，布伦特原油在几个月内下降，因此担心。

I spent a week kicking around the Gulf to get a better sense of how the world looks from there. It is a tough neighborhood, and the residents have good reason to be nervous. Thegeopolitical equation is indeed shifting on several fronts, not least the frighteningly rapid rise of ISIS in what used to be the countries of Syria and Iraq. And as Brent implodes, so does the fiscal position of all Gulf exchequers.

As for the first worry bead, “ISIS has now supplanted al-Qaeda in the U.S.’s demonology of extremist groups, but it has already occupied a similar position for a growing number of Middle Eastern states,” says Crispin Hawes, a Middle East analyst at Teneo Intelligence in London. “To Iran and its Hezbollah allies, ISIS is the bastard child of Western intervention and Wahhabi extremist anti-Shiism. To the Saudis, it is a revisitation by the Rule of Unintended Consequences, originally written during the 1980s Afghan war. To governments in Amman, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi and beyond, ISIS appears a very real and immediate threat.”

一年前，当我制作同样的艰苦时，我的阿拉伯朋友最担心伊拉克伊朗的什叶派对伊朗的影响力，通过巴沙尔阿萨德的叙利亚，并进入由他被认为是德黑兰的代理人。他们在海湾西海岸沿着墨西哥海岸，尤其是巴林的什叶派大多数。

But now they are equally worried about radical Sunni Islam, not just Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s self-proclaimed caliphate under ISIS but also the embittered remnants of the穆斯林兄弟会, which have been driven underground in Egypt and across the region.

“卡塔里斯曾经相信他们可以达成穆斯林兄弟情谊，并在埃及的政治参与 - 实际管理埃及政府的责任 - 将转变[前总统穆罕默德] Morsi和他的同事进入鄂尔多安和他的AKP等事情，“在该地区长期经验，指的是土耳其总统的大陆外交官Recep Tayyip Erdogan。”But that ambiguity is over. Now all the Gulf emirs and the House of Saud have thrown their lot in with military autocrats like[Egyptian President Abdel Fattah] al-Sisi。他们正在写一些非常大的检查来为这提供资金。与穆斯林兄弟会结束是一场斗争。没有更多学习歧义或tous azimuts外交。他们现在都暴露了。“

Some optimistic observers believe this mutual exposure may be enough to drive fractious Gulf monarchs, Turkish politicians and even the Iranian ayatollahs together. “The silver lining in this dark ISIS cloud is that their savagery may drive governments in the region to set aside their enmity for a bit and cooperate as required to put down this common threat,“ suggests a Lebanese banker based in Abu Dhabi.

Teneo的Hawes找到了这态度的思维。”As the conflict continues, rather than acting as a unifying factor between Iraq’s various sectarian and ethnic communities, the geographical pattern of violence is starting to reinforce Shia sentiment that the problem is one inherent to Sunni areas and that, rather than being confronted by a unified Iraqi government, it is in fact only Shia soldiers and Shia militias that are holding ISIS back,” he says. “As this perception hardens, it will be increasingly difficult for [Prime Minister Haider al-] Abadi to convince his Shia governing colleagues of the benefits of further compromises to the Sunni population. Moreover, as the threat from ISIS continues, the deeper Iran’s involvement in Iraq becomes, particularly on a military level. Iran’s influence will add to this reluctance.”

第二个担心是伊朗ad. The Gulf rulers believe they are increasingly on their own in the face of persistent Iranian proxy warfare and regional ambitions. They believe President Hassan Rouhani is a master diplomat, “a smiling wolf in sheep’s clothing” as one Kuwaiti banker quips, running circles around the major powers (P5 + 1) seeking to negotiate a containment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“你可以在新闻中看到P5 + 1如何几乎任何东西都在与伊朗核对核协议的良好面孔，让伊朗人在突破中留下几个月。我认为Ayatollahs对此很好，“银行家预测。“这是GCC [海湾合作委员会]国家，这些国家将在水域上对几乎核伊朗的前景来扼杀牙齿。也许比你的朋友更多的是以色列人。“

The Saudis have been repressing the Shia citizens in their Eastern Province since 2011 in an escalating cycle of demonstrations, police crackdowns and jailings. According to the crowdsourced chronicle Wikipedia, so far the Saudis have killed 17, injured several hundred and arrested 145 demonstrators. They arrested a prominent Shia cleric, Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, in July 2012. A Saudi court sentenced al-Nimr to death for sedition in mid-October, setting off a new cycle of demonstrations, capped by an apparent Sunni-extremist attack on a Shia procession on November 3, the Shia holy day of Ashura, that killed seven and wounded ten.

The Saudis’ cousins the Khalifa, the ruling family of Bahrain, have been engaged in an even more existential struggle against their Shia-majority subjects over the same period. The body count grows each month, with violent encounters on the outskirts of Manama when I was flying over. Again, according to Wikipedia’s careful documentation, since 2011 more than 80 Shia demonstrators have been killed and 2,929 arrested, of whom five died in police custody. The intensity of the struggle can be viewed atVice.com, where an inside view is presented by their intrepid reporter Ben Anderson in “巴林：一个不方便的起义。”

The third worry bead is Washington. “The Saudis and the Gulf Arabs distrust the Obama administration as feckless and ignorant in equal measure,” says a British diplomat over dinner in Dubai. “They believe Washington is forging a détente with Tehran that will leave them on their own. They know Obama loathes [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and doesn’t really give a damn now that he’s a lame duck.” He smiles grimly. “Who else could bring the Saudis and the Israelis together than Hussein Obama?”

他的另一个sip盗版杜松子酒补剂。”My Arab friends call this Obama’s ‘East of Suez’ moment,” using the phrase for Britain’s historical withdrawal of military forces from East and South Asia in the late 1960s. “Your president’s okay with sending airplanes but is adamant against boots on the ground in the Middle East, even though his own generals are telling him that you can’t win this war just from the air.”

一位科威特商人向我抱怨，奥巴马政府甚至不知道它真正的一面，这么困惑是现在的景观。“你美国人有什么样的策略？”他用手掌姿态问道。“Isis在视频上削减了两名美国记者的头，奥巴马开始轰炸？亚慱体育app在屠宰10万人屠宰和阿萨德甚至使用化学武器时，虽然屠宰了两年的时间我称之为没有策略。“

The fourth worry bead is oil. The eyes of macro traders and Gulf princes alike will be on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ drab modernist building on the Helferstorferstrasse in Vienna later this month when cartel ministers meet to consider reducing production quotas — or not. Nobody knows if OPEC cuts in output can bring Brent back toward $100, or whether the Saudis even want to try.

6月回到6月，我投上了三十名全球宏观交易员，为他们的市场预测的年度预测，包括他们预期的石油价格。回想起来，大多数人都错了。我们的交易商指定了平均53％的概率，即布伦特油将在100美元和120亿美元到12月31日的乐队内，31％，它将在120美元以上的年度结束。平均赌注只有16％的人将低于100美元。但它已经下降了，11月17日陷入了78.92美元。

Those forecasts of $100-plus oil were based on a pessimistic assessment of geopolitics in the region. In the same June poll our traders assigned an average probability of 33 percent that Egypt would descend into violence, and 58 percent that Iraq would erupt into full-blown civil war. Guess what: Egypt is violent and half of Iraq is under ISIS’s sway, with the Kurds acting as a de facto independent state and the Shia east hardening against their Sunni brethren each day the conflict goes on.

作为一个经验丰富的能源交易者在六月说：“我强烈地认为，地缘政治风险是我在职业生涯中见过的最高人数。利比亚有很好的机会永远不会在线回来。伊朗遇到了麻烦。市场正在识别伊拉克提高生产，但该国可能随时分崩离析。存货处于纪录的低点，但价格继续不做任何事情。在石油市场的背景下，这没有意义。我对石油市场的最强烈观点是这种低波动环境不能持续存在。如果在伊朗或俄罗斯或伊拉克发生的事情，价格将非常高，非常迅速地飙升。“

Yet Brent is below $80 and still headed south. “Earlier this year crude oil was the most overvalued and overbought commodity in the world,” says Michael Lewis, global head of commodities research at Deutsche Bank in London. “We estimate that crude oil prices would need to fall to $70 per barrel to bring oil as a percent of global GDP back to its long-run historical average.”

Standard & Poor’s recently revised its Brent crude oil price assumption to $85 per barrel for the remainder of 2014 and $90 for 2015. At this price, only four of the Gulf countries can still run a government budget surplus: Oman, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE. Saudi Arabia’s fiscal balance is red below the mid-$90s, Libya below $110 and Iraq below $115. The two Shia-majority countries, Iran and Bahrain, run red below $135.

Will the Saudis use their pivotal production capacity to reduce output and edge prices up closer to their own fiscal break-even price? Currently OPEC pumps 31 million barrels a day, just shy of 34 percent of world oil production; the Saudis account for more than a third of this. Most analysts agree that OPEC would need to cut production by 1 million or 2 million barrels a day to steady prices.

“沙特政策制定者对降低价格对欧佩克国家的影响并不是视而不见的影响，但现实是该制度对试图保护最脆弱的主要生产者的预算没有兴趣，这是伊朗，伊拉克和委内瑞拉”的最脆弱的主要生产者的预算“observes Teneo’s Hawes. “If, however, Naimi and his colleagues come to a view that prices could dip below $75 per barrel for a protracted period, they will take into consideration the impact on their key GCC allies, Kuwait and UAE,” he adds, referring to Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi.

委内瑞拉伊朗可以在1949年首次接近沙特阿拉伯，科威特和伊拉克“探索石油生产国家之间定期和更加综合沟通的途径”探索途径，以创建欧佩克州的索赔。他们的主动钻孔果实十年后欧佩克正式建立。现在他们是伴侣。10月，委内瑞拉外交部长拉斐尔·拉米德尔兹呼吁欧佩克特别会议稳定。他没有回应。他不太可能在本月晚些时候在常常的维也纳会议上获得同情的听证会。

ISIS’s al-Baghdadi may care about the slumping price of oil as well. “It is clear to me that ISIS is a sophisticated organization,” muses Michael Hintze, founder and chief investment officer of London-based hedge fundCQS，在访问科威特期间。“我担心他们将获得对石油生产领土的控制，并且来自这些地区的石油将停止。相反的是通过，而他们所拥有的资金来源是出售石油。因此，传输机制进入全球金融系统 - 即油价上的尖峰 - 尚未通过。事实上，我的理解是他们一直在廉价地销售石油。“它昂贵的建筑哈里卡特并对一个战争反对，因为isis和库尔德人都发现了。两者都正忙于卖出大量的石油进入黑色市场。入场地缘政治的招待价格是金钱，很多。

以前拥有阿拉伯情报服务的老朋友在迪拜一天晚上在芬芳烟草的水烟水管上慢滑。具有讽刺意味的是，水烟被称为伊斯莎on the Arabian Peninsula, derived from the Persian word for “glass.” I confess a lifetime addiction to伊斯莎, and yes, I do inhale.

“我们喜欢责备isis对美国人，”他说。“事实上，伊朗人同意，这是他们宣传的一部分。但是，如果你想责怪任何人的ISIS，责备Maliki，“他补充说，指前伊拉克总理Nouri Al-Maliki。他接受了另一个吹，反思地俯瞰苗条，在温暖的夜空中耸立的Burj Khalifa。“当然，你可以责怪Maliki对美国人，但是Maliki实际上是伊朗傀儡。所以你最终责备德黑兰的Isis吗？欢迎来到我们的地中主的镜子大厅。“木炭上的小余烬伊斯莎briefly flicker red, then go gray.

James Shinn是普林斯顿大学工程和应用科学学院的讲师（jshinn@princeton.edu) and chairman of Teneo Intelligence. After careers on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, he served as national intelligence officer for East Asia at the Central Intelligence Agency and as assistant secretary of defense for Asia at the Pentagon. He serves on the advisory boards ofKensho, a Cambridge-based data analytics firm; Predata, a New York–based predictive analytics firm; andCQS, a London-based hedge fund.