Oil Jumps After Trump Calls for Tehran Evacuation

Bloomberg

10 hours ago

00:00
It is very tricky to sort of weave through all of the headlines that are coming through. But for the most part, we have seen oil move dramatically higher on Friday. Yesterday, there was a bit of a relief, I guess, because things didn't escalate even further as far as energy infrastructure is concerned. How much geopolitical tailwinds you think is actually priced in to where Brent is trading right now, Anthony? Yeah, I mean, I think this movement in the oil price is all geopolitical premium. So as you see it going up and down, that that is going to be what it is. So where we started before this was we were looking at prices around the 60, 65 realm. So, you know, we're talking about roughly $10 higher than than where we were kind of last week going into this. Now, we have seen that movement going up and down. And I think we are going to continue to see that volatility as the market reacts to headlines as the headline comes out. They're very reactive to the geopolitical issues as the market and traders then look and see what the actual implications are for supply and for the oil price. So we haven't seen that come through yet. So at present, you know where we are now around $74. I think what I when I spoke on television yesterday was around 75. You know, we're not at interruption levels yet. So people are not traders are not concerned about the interruption of supply. We're just kind of reacting on those headlines. We did see that big move higher at the start of trading yesterday on those headlines from the weekend that the first strikes were starting to hit some energy infrastructure. However, that hasn't been the key production or exporting infrastructure that Iran needs. People have been talking about the Trump pump. That's that expression I've been reading a lot and comments over the last couple of days because what OPEC's did was bring forward the supply, the production to the market in a way that actually surprised market participants. And now people are saying that if they hadn't done that, then oil prices would be trading a lot higher than where they are right now. Do you think there is perhaps somewhat of a political element to the Opec+ decision making that took place in the run up to these events? I mean, of course, when you are talking about governments getting together and deciding on these these big issues, they are there is some element of politics. And that sort of fact will tell you that they're looking very much at the fundamentals of the market, but they are a group of governments that come together. So even between OPEC themselves, there's a lot of politics in terms of keeping the group together. So that decision was based a lot on politics around keeping the group together, because countries like the UAE, which have a lot of spare capacity and have invested a lot of money in that spare capacity, want to get that oil to the market. So we saw this even as long as a year ago when Opec+ decided to start putting in place this plan to increase barrels. That was a political issue to keep cohesion. And now we're seeing it. OPEC is saying that this round was caused because they saw lower stockpiles because the market could take it. Well, what we were looking at up until last week was the market could take it until about the first half. And then we were going a very week. And now we've got this geopolitical concern in there. So those barrels are helping. But OPEC still has a lot of spare capacity that they could still bring on. Of course, they're not going to be complaining about the higher price Trump might be, but this is out of anybody's control right now, as we were actually these headlines. And if the conflict does escalate, then things could go even higher. If and that's a big if, if those supplies impacted and production and export facilities are hit.