Philip K. Verleger, Jr.

During his long and distinguished career, Dr. Verleger has correctly anticipated most of the major structural changes occurring in the oil industry over the last 25 years. For example, in 1986 he became the first economist to fully comprehend and explain the appearance and development of energy commodity markets. Since then, Dr. Verleger has chronicled the evolution of these markets in The Petroleum Economics Monthly. Over a quarter century, he has examined many developments and anticipated the outcomes of a number of market manipulation strategies, including Metalgesellschaft’s disastrous trading program in 1992. More recently, Dr. Verleger was one of the first to examine and again correctly predict the impact of outside investment in commodities.

Dr. Verleger’s investigations have influenced developments in oil markets. His work includes two important academic studies on petroleum markets: Adjusting to Volatile Oil Prices (1994) and Oil Markets in Turmoil (1982). His research in 1998 contributed to Saudi Arabia’s adoption of a new market strategy in March 1999. In April 1999, Dr. Verleger correctly predicted that the Saudi strategy would take crude oil prices to the mid to high 20s.

In August 2004, Dr. Verleger warned that U.S. environmental regulations would cause crude oil prices to rise to $60 per barrel by limiting the availability of key petroleum products. He later wrote that the squeeze on product supply, combined with the absence of central bank concern, could take crude prices to $100. Both events came to pass.

Dr. Verleger earned his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1971. He began his work on energy as a consultant to the Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project in 1972. He then served as a Senior Staff Economist on President Ford’s Council of Economic Advisers and Director of the Office of Energy Policy at the U.S. Treasury in President Carter’s administration. While there, he was the key author of the economic study that supported the end of U.S. controls on crude prices in the Carter administration. He was also one of the principal authors of the Crude Oil Windfall Profit Tax enacted by Congress in 1980.

Dr. Verleger has been a Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer at the School of Organization and Management at Yale University, a Vice President in the Commodities Division at Drexel Burnham Lambert, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for International Economics. He is now Owner and President of PKVerleger LLC, as well as the David E. Mitchell/EnCana Professor of Management at the University of Calgary's Haskayne School of Business.