This investment bank just slashed its oil price prediction for 2016

Oil are crashing once again and are now trading at terrible lows of around $32.50 per barrel.

While the chief executive of Shell Ben van Beurden made a pretty bullish call on the price of oil, by saying "the oil prices we are seeing today are not sustainable and are going to settle at higher levels ," the data says otherwise.

[It's worth nothing that Shell is trying to complete its merger with BG Group - one of the biggest oil deals in history - and low oil price forecasts are damaging for the company's health.]

In a report entitled " Global Energy Weekly: Can oil prices find a floor?" Francisco Blanch and his team of strategists at Bank of America Merrill Lynch said:

... we are now revising down our crude oil forecasts and see Brent averaging $46/bbl in 2016, from $50 prior, and WTI $45/bbl, from $48 prior.

This is mainly because while "c onditions for floor on oil are coming together," OPEC's price war - which is intended to flood the market with supply, meaning prices will be purposefully pushed lower - "got worse over the weekend."

Leading OPEC member Saudi Arabia is arguably to blame for hurting its own economy and killing oil prices because it is a "swing producer," meaning it produces so much oil that it can shift prices depending on how much of the product it releases to the market

Simply - Saudi Arabia has the power to move prices.

But it doesn't want to, because as media outlet OilPrice.com and various others, including Business Insider , have pointed out Saudi Arabia is more interested in trying to kill off direct oil production competition in the US than keeping it's economy afloat.

There are no other benefits to prices going as low as they are for oil-rich nations other than this long-term strategy.

On top of this, BAML warns that considering there is over-supply in the market at the moment, this is only going to be exacerbated when Iran hits the market with its oil supply after a period of sanctions.

BAML strategists warned in earlier notes that crude oil prices could fall as low as the mid-$20s per barrel - albeit short term. However, if you take an average of the whole year's fluctuation, it predicts that crude oil forecasts will be around the levels that are stipulated above.

But BAML aren't the first to mention this. In November, Goldman Sachs stated that $20 oil could soon be a reality , and this was back when WTI was worth more than $45 (£31) per barrel.

So, unless there is a huge withdrawal of supply from OPEC, it looks like low oil prices will be around for at least the next year.

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