Moving the goalposts

摘要

The good news for Opec and its non-Opec partners is that they have reached their goal of reducing oil inventories to the five-year average. The bad news is that they have reached their goal of reducing oil inventories to the five-year average. Ministers want to lay the groundwork for longer-term co-operation, and were busy changing the message about the production agreement’s nominal aim as the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee met in Jeddah on 20 April. “Oil markets are too complex to distill down to one number or one metric even,” Saudi oil minister Khalid al-Falih says. “Until those indicators lead to investments that will bring the future supply that we need, we will not consider ourselves to have fully succeeded.” Handily for producers, this means not taking any action to rein in a rally that has taken North Sea Dated to a three-and-a-half year high of nearly $75/bl.