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Reader question: Please explain “all the cards” in this sentence: Opec doesn’t hold all the cards. My comments: Opec refers to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, including major oil producers in the Middle East plus Venezuela in South America. Together, they control something like half of the world’s oil production and more than half of all the world’s known reserves. Using that clout or near monopoly, Opec is known to have been able to control oil prices worldwide. It usually does this by setting output quotas among members, thus controlling world output. By controlling supply, they can then influence demand. The world’s demand for oil at any given time is, as a matter of fact, more or less the same, as determined by the global economy as a whole. If global economy is growing fast, then demand is up. Conversely, in a economic slowdown, demand is down. Anyways, the role of Opec is, generally speaking, to limit its output and therefore hopefully increase the demand (by artificially limiting supply). Sometimes, often times as a matter of fact, it is able to do this because it has the near monopoly over production and reserves. Or because it holds all the cards, in other words. All the cards? Yes, the question is what cards? The big cards, or trump cards and aces etc, as this expression originates from the game of poker. | 
