In “The Oil Weapon Against Moscow” (op-ed, March 27), Andriy Yermak, head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, writes, “In 1986, President Ronald Reagan and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia developed a plan to lower the price of oil.” Mr. Yermak then asserts that this plan was designed to cripple the Soviet Union.
I was a senior economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, where I was responsible for energy policy, and later an oil trader who, as reported by Lee Daniels in the New York Times (Feb. 4, 1986), was one of the first to predict the collapse of OPEC in 1986 and an oil-price plunge to below $10 a barrel. I think Mr. Yermak hasn’t consulted the historical record.
To discipline OPEC members who were cheating on their quotas and drive marginal non-OPEC producers out of the market, the Saudis, operating as the OPEC cartel’s swing producer, opened their taps and the price of oil plunged to $9.75 a barrel on March 31, 1986. Contrary to Mr. Yermak’s assertions, however, these events didn’t bring cheers from the Reagan administration.
Instead, the Reagan administration hit the panic button and trotted out no less than Vice President George H.W. Bush for a hurriedly arranged press conference on March 31. The vice president didn’t mince his words: “I think it is essential that we talk about stability [of oil prices].” With that, oil prices immediately turned around.
Prof. Steve H. Hanke
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore