Nick Fountain

but we're too afraid to ask?

I'm Nick Fountain.

Today on the show, we're going to track down the answers to Valerie's questions.

What is OPEC?

Why does it exist?

How and why does it control oil prices?

And why did the United Arab Emirates just leave OPEC?

All right, good luck on the camping trip.

Thank you so much.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

All right, let's do this.

Our first two questions, courtesy of listener Valerie, what is OPEC and why does it exist?

The simplest answer, it's a group of oil states that have huge sway over oil markets because they decide together how much to pump.

But there is so much more.

Starting with a great story about why OPEC exists, which involves a secret meeting under a tree on the banks of the Nile.

This meeting happened in 1959, and the reason it happened had to do with who controlled the oil market at the time.

Which was not the countries that had the most oil, you know, the Saudi Arabia and Venezuela's of the world.

Who controlled the oil markets was the American and European companies that were drilling in those countries.

And those companies, which included the likes of Gulf and Shell and Texaco, you might remember from our recent show about Venezuelan oil, had a pretty cool nickname.