Oilprice

Oil prices surged on Monday after Saudi Arabia and other OPEC+ producers announced a surprise cut in the amount of crude they plan to pump out every month.

Russian energy spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the move was designed to "keep crude oil and petroleum product prices at a certain level." On Friday, they were only at 50 per cent. The move by the oil cartel impacted interest rate expectations, as moves to increase the price of oil won't help central banks around the world, who are trying to bring down inflation.

Oil prices are not going anywhere near $100 per barrel despite the latest round of production cuts according to Citigroup's Ed Morse.

[raised its Brent Crude forecast](/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Goldman-Sachs-Raises-Oil-Price-Forecast-Following-OPEC-Cut.html) to $95 from $90 at the end of the year. ADVERTISEMENT supply growth and uncertainty in Chinese demand growth path will keep the market fairly balanced, Ed Morse, global head of commodities research at Citigroup, told

Oil prices surged after Saudi Arabia and some other oil producers announced they're reducing their oil output. That will send gas prices higher – and ...

Last week the Dallas Fed released its quarterly survey of oil companies. But the U.S. is also the world's largest producer of oil. is the world's largest consumer of oil, by a long shot. Saudi Arabia and the U.S. The U.S. Analysts at RBC Capital Markets, who have traveled to Riyadh several times in recent months, wrote that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia now sees the U.S. The kingdom consistently denies that production decisions are made with a specific price target in mind. That hurt the budgets of countries like Saudi Arabia, which rely on oil revenue. And cutting production was a reliable way to bring prices back up. Reducing oil production means less supply on the market, which obviously pushes prices higher. "Overall, we think that oil price says might increase by around 10% going forward compared to what we had," says Leon, of Rystad Energy.

Since 2017, Russia and China were working closely together in Iraq in order to secure lucrative oil contracts, and diminish the influence of Western ...

However, the FGI in Baghdad and SOMO argue that under Article 111 of the Constitution oil and gas are under the ownership of all the people of Iraq in all the regions and governorates. [my latest book on the global oil markets](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Guide-Global-Market-Trading/dp/191274113X), the China-Russia axis feels sufficiently emboldened to signal its true purpose: it is taking full control of the Middle East. The third reason was that it was that in addition to the military elements that Russia had brought to its activities in the Iraq Kurdistan region, the huge new Chinese deal in the south was being done by Zhenhua Oil, an arm of China’s huge defence contractor Norinco. At the end of 2020/beginning of 2021, China decided to use the same strategy in southern Iraq that Russia had used in the northern Kurdistan region. There is no problem shipping or selling any of the oil and gas that China itself does not want, as sanctions currently are only on Iran, not Iraq, and these can easily be circumvented anyway, through methods also analysed in depth in [my latest book on the global oil markets](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Guide-Global-Market-Trading/dp/191274113X). First, the deal was obviously straight out of the playbook that Russia had used to gain control over the Iraqi Kurdistan oil industry in 2017, as analysed above. Consequently, they believe that all oil and gas developed across all of Iraq should be sold through official channels of the central Federal Government of Iraq in Baghdad. The KRG also maintains that Article 115 states: “All powers not stipulated in the exclusive powers of the federal government belong to the authorities of the regions and governorates that are not organised in a region.” As such, the KRG argues that as relevant powers are not otherwise stipulated in the Constitution, it has the authority to sell and receive revenue from its oil and gas exports. It was then Russia that fomented discord between the KRG in the north and the FGI government in the south, principally by exploiting existing discontent on both sides with the budget payments-for-oil deal that had been agreed between north and south Iraq in 2014. This deal never worked properly, and Russia from 2017 sought to exacerbate this to create much greater discord between north and south Iraq through several methods also analysed in depth in [natural gas ](/Energy/Natural-Gas/Natural-Gas-A-Comprehensive-Guide-To-The-Worlds-Most-Crucial-Fuel.html)centre of the world, the Middle East. And that context is more easily explained if the deal is written not as the Saudi Arabia-Iran deal, but rather as the Saudi Arabia/OPEC-China/Russia/Shia Crescent of Power deal.