How Donald Trump Plays Havoc With OPEC Policy
If timing is everything, why does OPEC seem to keep getting it so wrong? The group’s 2019 oil output cuts got off to a flying start in January and they’re going to get bigger, just as U.S. sanctions on Venezuela start to bite.
The problem for the producers, and their allies in the wider OPEC+ group, is that they don’t wield nearly as much control over the market as some people accuse of them of doing. And that makes getting the timing of their actions right almost impossible. Unexpected external factors just seem to keep cropping up and, at least recently, many of them seem to originate with Uncle Sam.
The surge and then crash in oil prices in the second half of last year is a case in point.
Back in June, President Donald Trump tweeted that he had asked Saudi Arabia’s King Salman to boost the country’s production to counter the “turmoil & disfunction [sic] in Iran and Venezuela.” The king duly obliged, but prices kept on rising, driven in part by Trump’s avowal to cut Iran’s oil exports to zero when sanctions came into effect in early November.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/how-donald-trump-plays-havoc-with-opec-policy/ar-BBT6s2Z?li=BBnbfcN