Middle East & North Africa
Highlights The market will not give OPEC 2.0 until March to sort out a durable modus operandi to manage supply and maintain the discipline required to defend crude oil prices. While the odds of Libya and Nigeria being able to keep production at current levels - much less grow output - are less…
Highlights The G20 summit highlighted our theme of multipolarity, which encourages global instability; U.S.-China tensions have resumed their escalation after a brief pause; The Middle East is still a "red herring" for investors this year, but tail risks are rising; Any negative impact on…
Highlights With crude-oil inventory transfers from OPEC to western refining centers slowing, OPEC 2.0's production cuts will begin to show up in high-frequency OECD inventory data in the form of lower stock levels. The coalition has been bedeviled by higher production from Libya and Nigeria, and…
Highlights Odds the leaders of the OPEC 2.0 petro-states will be forced to back up last month's "whatever it takes" declaration - perhaps deepening and extending the 1.8mm b/d production cuts agreed at the end of last year - are not yet overwhelming. All the same, they will continue to increase,…
Highlights This week, Commodity & Energy Strategy is publishing a joint report with our colleagues at BCA's Energy Sector Strategy. Driven by the leadership of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and Russia, OPEC 2.0 formalized the well-telegraphed decision to extend its production cuts for…
Highlights Unsurprisingly, OPEC 2.0's leadership agreed on the need to extend the coalition's 1.8mm b/d production-cutting agreement to end-March 2018. Leaders of the coalition - the energy ministers of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and Russia - will recommend as much when the coalition…
Highlight Once-ebullient oil markets are overwrought. Fears that an economic slowdown in China will spill over into EM - the engine of global commodity demand growth - along with a very weak 1Q17 U.S. GDP performance, will keep oil markets focused on downside risks to prices. On the supply side…
Highlights Despite Saudi-Iranian tensions, the OPEC 2.0 production-cut deal will survive; Petro-state balance sheets remain under pressure; OPEC 2.0 agreement will backwardate the forward curve, and slow the pace of shale recovery; Aramco IPO will motivate Saudi Arabia to over-deliver on the…
Highlights Despite cooperating to reduce oil production and drain global oil inventories, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and Iran still compete at every level for dominance of the Gulf region's economic and geopolitical order. We have maintained that KSA's aggressive push to privatize (or de-…