Liam Denning, Columnist

Trump Reminds OPEC He’s a Wild Card

His call for more oil raises the prospect of tapping the SPR.

June 5, 2018 at 5:04 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.

On notice.
Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg

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“We need more oil!” isn’t usually the cue for a sell-off. But after Bloomberg News reported Tuesday morning that U.S. officials asked Saudi Arabia and some other OPEC members to bump up supply by about one million barrels a day – typically a demand that intimates some kind of shortage – futures prices fell about 2 percent, extending recent declines.

If anything, the apparent specificity of the request is its most unusual feature and ought to be the most bullish. One million barrels a day is a lot, representing almost a third of OPEC’s spare capacity. If the U.S. government is looking for that much, it must be worried about not having enough.