Liam Denning, Columnist

Saudi Arabia's Totally Not Bluffing

It's struggling to bend OPEC, Russia and U.S. shale rivals to its will.

March 14, 2017 at 5:17 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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We've already reached that stage in Saudi Arabia's poker game with the oil market where it drops the stony face and simply declares, "I'm not bluffing."

As Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, OPEC's Monthly Oil Market Report showed an odd discrepancy in Saudi Arabia's production numbers for February. OPEC publishes two sets of such supply figures, official ones provided by members and estimates derived from secondary sources (a sure sign of rock-solid trust, that). While secondary sources had Saudi Arabian output falling by 68,000 barrels a day last month, the country claims it actually boosted it by 263,000 barrels a day.