Demand for oil is falling as world economic activity sputters. Many analysts are now forecasting that the barrel price could go as low as $50 to $60 in the next few weeks.

"Unfortunately, it's high prices that cause people to be careful about energy use," said Jay Hakes, who lived in Grand Rapids as a child and is director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta.

Goldman is the latest in a series of major investment banks to be placed under a so-called "review" by Platts, which has said it may sometimes need to limit the activities of some companies in its half-hour price-discovery process if their acceptability by counterparties threatens to distort benchmark prices.

Excluding Iraq, the 12 members bound by production agreements produced an average 30.18 million b/d, the survey showed. This is 230,000 b/d less than the August output of 30.41 million b/d and exceeds the so-called OPEC-12 output target of 29.673 million b/d by 507,000 b/d.

The companies have crushed their smaller rivals as they fought to protect their own bottom line from the impact of unprofitably low state-set fuel prices, the Beijing News reported.

With the current rout of speculators pulling in their horns from the commodity markets and the economy's impact on oil and oil product consumption, and finally the growing and widespread realization of the enviromental and national security dangers inherent in fossil fuel consumption, the price of oil is collapsing. Or is it?

``We have had crazy days for a week now,'' said Johannes Smari Oluffsson, manager of the Bonus discount grocery store in Reykjavik's main shopping center. ``Sales have doubled.''

Among future scenarios are the Olympics being held in cyberspace and central Australia being abandoned, according to the think tank report.

Goldman reduced its estimate for the U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude for the fourth quarter to $75 a barrel from $110, and cut its year-end target to $70 a barrel from $115, Goldman's research analysts led by Jeffrey Currie and Giovanni Serio said in a report today.

It's so serious, he said, that unless we reach a point where we stop emitting greenhouse gases entirely, 80 per cent of the world's species will become extinct, and human civilization as we know it will be destroyed, by the end of this century.

"As production falls, the sales to the US become more important," said Pietro Donatello, an oil analyst from Latin Petroleum in the capital, Caracas. "Only the US is paying the full amount for Venezuelan oil and in cash, the rest are in some kind of barter agreements."

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.