The Wonk Room

Flashback: Murdoch Predicted Oil Prices Would Near ‘$20 A Barrel’ After Iraq War

Our guest blogger is Scott Lilly, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Last week, in a fiery exchange with a producer from Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, Bill Moyers challenged Rupert Murdoch’s 2003 prediction that the Iraq war would lead to a decrease in global oil prices:

Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute—to support the Iraq war, Rupert Murdoch said the best thing that will come out of the Iraq war will be gasoline at $20 a barrel. Now, today, when I came here, I looked, and it was $130-something. When is Rupert going to explain why the war didn’t give us $20-a-barrel oil?

A study of U.S. crude oil expenditures as a percentage of GDP demonstrates Murdoch’s folly. Not only has the world not benefited from “cheaper oil,” but prices are now at an all time high: