It's all about whether Saudi, Kuwaiti, Russian, etc producers can undercut the price of US shale oil. And at $57/barrel, they can...
There are some very smart people in those countries, pulling these strings. They must have a plan, an objective, a goal and a timeline. You don't just go upsetting the global commodity market on a whim.
And there are some very smart people working in underground offices in Washington DC who try to predict what will happen when that first group of smart people starts tinkering. There are scenario response plans, and confidential personality profiles of key players, and decision trees, and a thriving industry of folks whose job it is to brief the President on what will happen next week, next month, next year. I just can't believe that the price of oil is randomly down for no reason and nobody knows what might happen, or when.
We're talking about an industry that literally makes trillions of dollars per year, more than every tech company you've ever heard of combined, more than any nation state. If there is any single industry that can afford to think ahead, to pay people to predict the future, it's the energy sector. Trust me when I say I'm pretty sure they're not just winging it.
OPEC wouldn't be flooding the market unless they were pretty sure there was an edge in it. They think they know what will happen, and it might include global recession as multiple nations default on their debt, and the US energy boom is strangled. They think there is advantage in this for them, which means they think prices will be higher over time if they shut out other producers now by lowering the price, which means they think Russia and Venezuela and the US won't be able to ramp up to full production again when prices begin to recover. Or they think prices will be permanently low and they're okay with that, maybe for geopolitical reasons like monkeying with Iran or suppressing civil unrest.
I don't claim to be smart enough to know what all of those plans look like, but I'm smart enough to know that a plan exists. This isn't random market fluctuations.