OPEC plus needed a SWAT team, it got 23 battalions
A little over a week ago I wrote that oil producers need a mechanism allowing them to respond quickly to changes in the oil market that could be both big and fast. I’m pleased to see that’s what they’ve tried to create, even if it isn’t quite what I had in mind.
My colleague Alaric Nightingale suggested the OPEC+ alliance should assemble a small SWAT team that could take swift, tactical action. Instead, it has decided to mobilize its entire army as the rapid-response unit.
It did so at the end of another week of fractious meetings, which concluded with a signature OPEC+ compromise that its 23 members could all sign on to. The group, which includes Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates, agreed to raise its collective output by 500,000 barrels a day from Jan. 1.
