Brendan Greeley

So one huge difference between the UAE and the Saudis, the UAE has a much smaller population.

They've been doing a much better job of diversifying away from oil.

So when you look at the growth that's in their non-oil economy, it's actually much larger or significantly larger than it is in Saudi Arabia.

They've diversified into financial services, tourism, travel.

And so what that means is,

Oil analysts like to talk about sort of the lowest sustainable price of oil, the break-even rate.

What that means is different countries have different tolerances for low oil.

The Saudis need oil to be above about $90 a barrel in order to make sure that they're breaking even on all of the things they pay for in the

country.

The UAE has a much lower break-even rate.

So that looks to be about in the 60s, and they can keep things going.

The UAE right now was running surpluses before the war.

The Saudis were not.

And so the UAE has a lot of luxury to say, look, we can drive the price of oil down.

We don't need to be part of this.

And they were frustrated within the cartel.

They really wanted to pump a lot of oil.

They were pumping more oil than they should have under the cartel.

And they finally said, look,

Saudi Arabia, you're on your own.