The Secretary General of OPEC, Abdalla El-Badri couldn’t have put it any better in Vienna today, ‘there are genuine demand uncertainties’. To prevent further ‘demand destruction’, OPEC has decided to keep official quotas unchanged at 30mb/d. Non-official output is of course far higher at 31.85mb/d, and when we say OPEC, what we really mean, is Saudi Arabia: Riyadh is now in a totally dominant position to call all the volume and pricing shots across the cartel. The Vienna meetings tell us as much.
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