World creeping closer to `oil shock’

The charitable view is that Big Oil is merely reacting to investor expectations. “CEOs are listening to what institutional shareholders want,” Lehman Brothers Inc. analyst James Crandell told Business Week in June. “Production growth is a secondary goal, if it’s a goal at all.”

The less charitable view is that consumers are now at the mercy of a cabal of like-minded Big Oil CEOs who are no longer forced to bet their companies on a potential giant discovery