Liam Denning, Columnist

Saudi Arabia Should Follow Russia, Even If It Kills OPEC

Resisting further production cuts is the right idea for the long term.

March 6, 2020 at 5:22 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.

Red Cross medics check the temperature of participants of the 178th meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Vienna, Austria, on March 6, 2020.
Photographer: ALEX HALADA/AFP/Getty Images

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Is it really over? So soon?

Russia’s unwillingness to go along with Saudi Arabia’s emergency supply cut fuels speculation the whole OPEC+ thing is done. I don’t agree. OPEC+ has always been largely a marketing and political tool. Formally ditching it now would merely make obvious the underlying truth: OPEC+ wouldn’t exist in the first place unless OPEC on its own had lost credibility. If we are left with an arrangement mixing co-dependency with disagreement and frustration … well, we’ve all observed marriages like that, haven’t we? (Not yours and mine, obviously.)