oil prices

In this week's MacroVoices podcast, Erik Townsend and Joe McMonigle, former chief of staff at the US Department of Energy, discuss the state of the global energy market, and OPEC’s rapidly diminishing ability to control oil prices. McMonigle believes investors will be hearing more jawboning from the Saudis, OPEC's de-facto leader, over the next two weeks as they try to marshal support for extending the cartel's production-cut agreement past a March 2018 deadline.

Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

World GDP in current US dollars is in some sense the simplest world GDP calculation that a person might make. It is calculated by taking the GDP for each year for each country in the local currency (for example, yen) and converting these GDP amounts to US dollars using the then-current relativity between the local currency and the US dollar.

S&P futures were fractionally higher (+0.1% to 2,476) with all eyes on the Fed's rate decision as investors await another earnings deluge from companies including Facebook, Coca-Cola and Boeing. Asian and European shares were also higher, prompted by momentum from the latest US record high; the Dollar rebound continued while oil rose above $48 as copper hit a two year high.

Back in May, we pointed out an interesting observation made by Goldman: unlike late 2015 and most of 2016, when equities demonstrated surprising resilience to the swoon in oil prices, in 2017 OPEC's failure to stabilize oil prices finally hit energy equities disproportionately.  As Goldman said in mid-May, discussing the latest crude oil selloff, which has been "even more pronounced for longer-dated contracts reflecting increasing concerns over future balances in 2018 and beyond"...

Authored by Nick Cunningham via OilPrice.com,

In a desperate bid to survive its economic meltdown, Venezuela is lobbying other OPEC members to agree to steeper oil production cuts, a move that would likely lead to higher oil prices.

Venezuelan officials have reached out to their counterparts in Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia to press them on more collective action, according to Argus Media. If there was enough interest, the next step would be an “extraordinary meeting,” which would weigh the option of cutting deeper.