Liam Denning, Columnist

OPEC's Endless Hot-and-Cold Shower

Oil-exporting club has a particularly broad agenda, so balancing interests is harder and harder to do.

November 30, 2017 at 8:05 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.

1512070274_opecbig — Photographer: AKOS STILLER

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Showers, particularly older ones, can be tricky. First, you get hit with a freezing blast, so you turn up the hot water. Nothing happens. You turn it higher, and it warms up -- and then keeps warming up. Until it's scalding. Frantically, you turn up the cold water and stem the hot, and it cools down -- and then keeps cooling down. Until it's freezing ...

OPEC, trying to manage the temperature of the oil market, knows the feeling. Except, the controls on this shower have changed and more than a dozen sets of hands are trying to operate them (I'll end the imagery there).