Local investors awoke Monday to more turmoil on Wall Street, as trading was suspended for 15 minutes when the S&P 500 dropped more than seven percent.

Bob Seidenschwarz with S.G. Long Financial spoke to KGVO News just after 7:00 a.m. to provide background on what happened.

“Over the weekend, OPEC was meeting and there was a strong expectation that there would be further production cuts to help mitigate what we’re been seeing in world oil prices,” said Seidenschwarz. “Then Russia stepped in and to the surprise of many said Nyet,” he said. “What we saw then was, of course, not unexpected in terms of how we opened up this morning. They clearly stated that this is an attempt on their part to drive out and cut the production coming from the producers in the United States.”

Seidenschwarz said what happened over the weekend was a power struggle between two oil giants.

“The Saudi’s have declared war, at least in the short term, economically on Russia by saying, ‘all right, if you are not going to cooperate, here’s what’s going to happen, and they have cut pricing to gain market share and right now it is just flat out ugly because over the weekend we saw oil hit as low as $30 bucks a barrel.”

Seidenschwarz said the activity over the weekend that continued today cannot be sustained for a long period of time.

“This is what I want to stress to your listeners,” he said. “This is not sustainable. This may be painful in the short term , but producers and anybody associated with the industry and all the ancillary. In some respects, this acts like a big tax break for us, as well. I just want to caution people that I don’t think this is going to last very long. It may be several weeks, or it could be several months. This has all forced to bring Russia to the table for cooperation and to be able to find some sort of floor for oil prices which should be around $50 or $60 bucks a barrel.”

As of noon on Monday, the Dow Jones 30 Industrials were down over 1,800 points.

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