Liam Denning, Columnist

Exxon is Doha's Winner

OPEC cavalry's retreat will soften up acquisition targets.

April 18, 2016 at 4:07 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

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The oil market's deus ex machina took the weekend off. For a certain kind of oil company, that is actually a good thing.

The fiasco that was Sunday's Doha freeze-fest dealt a blow to hopes of divine intervention curing the oil market of too much supply. Compared to the OPEC meeting of Thanksgiving 2014, optimism was relatively guarded heading into this confab, which also involved non-OPEC producers such as Russia. Even so, oil prices fell about 6 percent after the meeting ended without a deal to freeze production, before recovering some of that ground.