Radio Free Europe reports that the Iranian oil minister is worried enough about falling crude prices to float consideration of OPEC production cuts. "'The high level of crude oil production has led global oil reserves to rise above the usual level,' he said [in Vienna], provoking ‘instability and the decline in prices in the past month.'" Lower oil revenue is a big deal to a regime that uses the cash to avert domestic instability. As the Washington Post reported last May,
Iran uses a good chunk of that [oil] money to raise public-sector wages and to subsidize its own gasoline prices, one way to keep domestic discontent in check when unemployment is running at more than 12 percent and inflation at 13 percent.
All this is why squeezing Iran's oil revenue should be a top priority of the U.S. government, as former Bush administration official Mark Sumerlin argues here.