With Saudi Riyal forwards plunging back above 3.81, dramatically weaker than the current peg, Bloomberg reports that Saudi authorities are cracking down on currency traders as speculation mounts that the world’s biggest oil exporter won’t be able to maintain the riyal’s peg to the dollar as revenue plunges.
With the OPEC meeting having started a little under two hours ago, it appears that the premature optimism raised yesterday about yet another imminent production freeze deal may have been mostly hot air. Indeed, yesterday's bounceback in oil was driven by the various reports of a potential reintroduction of a ceiling on production after the previous ceiling was scrapped in December. The WSJ ran a story suggesting that the willingness is shared by Saudi Arabia as well as smaller producers in Nigeria, Qatar, Algeria and Venezuela.
There are just two drivers setting the pace for today's risk mood: the OPEC meeting in Vienna which started a few hours ago, and the ECB's announcement as well as Mario Draghi's press statement due out just one hour from now. Both are expected to not reveal any major surprises, with OPEC almost certainly unable to implement a production freeze while the ECB is expected to remain on hold and provide some more details on its corporate bond buying program, although there is some modest risk of upside surprise in either case.
After 15 years of claiming that Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible and acted alone, high-ranking Americans are publicly blaming Saudi Arabia for the 9/11 terrorist attacks…. and now Saudi Arabia is publicly blaming the United States. However, according to investigative journalist Wayne Masden, it was American neocons, Saudi Arabia and Israel that successfully pulled off the September 11 attacks. They are now infighting to the point that the layers of secrecy surrounding the crime of the 21st century, are starting to peel away.
Last week the bond market was stunned by the unprecedented demand for sovereign paper issued by the middle-eastern nation of Qatar, which announced it would issue $9 billion in Eurobonds (in three maturities), more than double what had been originally expected by the market, and well below the total demand for Qatar sovereign paper: according to Reuters, the issue was massively oversubscribed, with over $23 billion in soft orders.