In finance, as in comedy, timing is everything. Get it right and you have investors (or the audience) in the palm of your hand. Get it wrong and the ensuing silence is painful.
Saudi Arabia has stepped on stage finally to launch the initial public offering of its oil monopoly Saudi Aramco. By a strange quirk of the calendar, the price of the shares will be set on the same day OPEC meets to decide the next step in its strategy of propping up the price of crude.
It’s hard to see this coincidence as anything other than unhappy for Riyadh. To get the best price for its Aramco shares, it needs to stop the oil price from weakening. Yet this leaves it at the mercy of members of the OPEC+ group of nations that haven’t been doing their fair share of cutting crude production to shore up the price: namely Russia and Iraq, who’ve preferred to let the Saudis shoulder the burden along with their allies Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
