Those three trends—the collapse in demand, the relentless buildup of non-OPEC supply, and the Great Inventory Dump—reduced the call on OPEC by something like 13 million barrels per day, a fall of 43 percent from the levels of 1979! The Iranian Revolution and then the Iran-Iraq War had crippled the exporting capacity of those two countries. Yet suddenly, instead of the feared shortage, there was a large surplus of production capacity over market demand—in short, the makings of a massive glut.1
