It's a good question. Let me answer the question this way: OPEC is the biggest single factor for the inflation shock of 2020 to 2022 yet weirdly hardly anybody talks about it.

Let's rewind to March 2020 and the start of the pandemic. For a very brief period, April oil futures went negative. Technically, this was an extreme contango market. Oil producers were running out of places to store oil and nobody was buying.

For some more background, OPEC tries to maintain oil price stability. If it gets too low, they don't make enough money. If it gets too high it creates political instability and jeopardizes security relationships with the US and Europe. So every 3 months OPEC meets and looks at oil supply and the projected demand and they adjust production to maintain a price floor and a price ceiling. Before the war this was typically $70-80. In years past it might've been $60-70. They don't always succeed because of exteranl factors, unforeseeable changes in demand or even just member countries lying about production or production cuts.

So in April-May, the then Trump administration went to Saudi Arabia to get them and OPEC to cut oil production [1][2][3]. Instead of the 3 monthly reviews which would've naturally cut production anyway to maintain the price, Trump browbeat MBS into a 2 year production cut, initially 9.7Mbpd (million barrels per day) and then reducing over time to I believe 6.3Mbps [4].

This was a disastrous deal. You can overlay a chart of the 2 year deal and global inflation and they match up pretty much exactly.

The Biden administration quietly went to MBS and asked him to end the deal. He refused. There are historical reasons for this, namely that the US (under Trump) had kinda screwed Saudi Arabia over in 2015, 2017 and 2018 but I digress.

So in the US the politics of this were that Republicans were going to pin this on Biden (even though it was a Trump deal) and the Democrats were never going to blame Saudi Arabia. Instead it was just "oil companies are greedy and bad" from a pure short-term politics POV. Nobody brought up the 2020 OPEC deal. And that's wild to me. It just goes to show that US foreign policy is uniparty and a Democratic administration was never going to publicly split with an ally like Saudi Arabia.

So does OPEC matter? Well they were instrumental in enforcing that deal. So you tell me.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/special-report-trump...

[2]: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/opec-russia-approve...

[3]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/opec-would-miss-frie...

[4]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-saudi-cuts-idU...

That really does highlight how badly the US is a controlled petrostate, and how different that is to past events where the US goes around demanding that OPEC raise production.

OPEC doesn't adjust production. They set production targets, and then most of the members cheat. For geological reasons it's not even really possible to significantly reducing production on many oil wells without damaging them. Saudi Arabia generally has more freedom to throttle production up or down than other OPEC members.

You have another thing which is that MBS (correctly) felt comfortable ignoring Biden. If he'd slighted Trump in that way it would probably take 2 private jets to undo the damage.

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