Oil Prices Drop 2% as OPEC+ Plans to Accelerate Production
Taarek Refaat
Oil prices fell 2% on Wednesday after sources reported that OPEC+ would consider accelerating its oil production increase in June. However, losses were mitigated by a report that US President Donald Trump may cut tariffs on Chinese imports.
Brent crude futures fell $1.32, or 1.96%, to settle at $66.12 a barrel.
West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude closed down $1.40, or 2.2%, at $62.27.
Latest Oil Prices:
WTI Crude $62.25 -0.02 -0.03%
Brent Crude $66.12 -1.32 -1.96%
Murban Crude $67.12 -1.56 -2.27%
Louisiana Light $66.60 -0.72 -1.07%
Bonny Light $78.62 -2.30 -2.84%
Mars US $72.57 -1.09 -1.48%
Gasoline $2.081 -0.003 -0.14%
Natural Gas $3.000 -0.022 -0.73%
Brent crude, the global benchmark, reached a session high of $68.65, its highest level since April 4, before the OPEC+ announcement.
Three sources familiar with the OPEC+ talks said that several members of the oil alliance will propose accelerating oil production increases in June for the second consecutive month, amid escalating disagreements between countries that adhere to production quotas and those that exceed them.
Phil Flynn, an analyst at Price Futures Group, said, "I wouldn't be surprised if OPEC wanted to increase production. It could raise concerns about the cartel's cohesion. They may be tired of curbing production increases."
A source familiar with the matter said Wednesday that the Trump administration will consider reducing tariffs on imported Chinese goods pending talks with Beijing, adding that any action would not be unilateral.
Tariffs on China are likely to be reduced to between 50% and 65%, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, citing a White House official.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant said he believes excessive tariffs between the United States and China must be reduced before trade negotiations can resume.
Trump backed off his threat to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell days after criticizing the Fed for not cutting interest rates, easing investor concerns about economic uncertainty.
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Typically, students can apply for the FAFSA on Oct. 1 each year. But in 2023, the form wasn't available until Dec. 30. As a result, schools couldn't offer financial aid on time because they did not have the FAFSA information, forcing students to wait for delayed offers. 'Delays, glitches, and other issues led to a 9% decline in submitted FAFSA applications among first-time applicants, and an overall decline of about 432,000 applications as of the end of August,' said a report from the Government Accountability Office. Delahunt said that many of the students who had delayed FAFSAs would likely only make decisions about schools if their families had the money to go ahead without knowing how much they were going to have to pay. But many underrepresented minority students may come from poorer families that could not afford to guess how much college would cost. Impact of diversity on campus Experts said studies have found diversity of all kinds, not just racial diversity, is essential to students' education. 'These studies don't say that students of color benefit from diverse learning environments. White students also benefit. Every student benefits from a diverse learning environment,' Baker, from the University of Delaware, said. Jennifer Levine, a first-year student at Stanford University who is half Asian and half Jewish, agreed. She participates in a residential humanities program, where she lives with the same students she takes classes with, a group she described as predominantly White. The uniformity, she said, makes for 'a worse learning space.' 'I think that all academic environments are made better with more opinions, more experiences, people who have different sets of knowledge,' she told CBS News. 'For me as someone who's not Black reading Toni Morrison, I can't offer my perspective on that in the sense of race.' Stanford's first-year class has roughly half as many Black students this year compared to last year. Austin Shaw, one of those Black freshmen, said he can see the difference. He lives in a dorm that is themed around the Black diaspora, so many Black students choose to live there. 'All of us are very tight because we're literally like half of the Black freshman population,' he said of his dormmates. 'But when you go out into class, it's a completely different vibe.' Shaw said that about half of the students in his high school in Los Angeles were Black. One of the reasons he chose Stanford over other California schools was that it had a higher proportion of Black students. 'You become an expert on the subject of being Black, or you feel like you have to represent, or you feel like you have to talk for your community,' he said. 'When I was in high school, where half of the class would be Black, you wouldn't have that expectation.' 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But our goals are the same,' Delahunt said. Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, said that if schools were to consider socioeconomic status instead of race, they could still increase diversity on campus. Kahlenberg testified on behalf of Students for Fair Admissions in support of the ruling ending affirmative action. With data obtained through the legal process, he and an economist ran dozens of admissions simulations and found that considering socioeconomic status and ending preferential admissions for legacy students could increase diversity at Harvard and the University of North Carolina while maintaining academic caliber. 'If there were some universities that did not see declines in racial diversity, as we know there were some, then it's incumbent upon those institutions that saw larger drops to learn what happened,' Kahlenberg said. He added that universities and colleges have argued that this method would be far more expensive, as it would increase the amount of financial aid the schools have to provide. 'It's not that race-neutral alternatives are ineffective, it's that they cost more money,' he said. Some schools have increased socioeconomic diversity. UNC increased the number of students with federal Pell Grants to nearly a quarter of the class. Both Yale and Dartmouth's first-year classes had the highest-ever share of first-generation and low-income students, all while increasing their share of underrepresented minority students. All diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are at risk As universities adapt admissions processes to maintain diversity, they risk butting heads with an administration that is seeking to end all diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. The Department of Justice announced at the end of March that it is investigating four California universities to assess their compliance with the Supreme Court's ruling. University of California schools, which have not been allowed to use race as a factor in admissions directly since voters passed Proposition 209 in 1996, recently moved from using test scores and GPA for admissions to a ' comprehensive review ' process. That process looks 'at multiple factors beyond courses and grades to evaluate applicants' academic achievements in light of the opportunities available to them and the capacity each student demonstrates to contribute to the intellectual life of the campus,' according to the University of California's admissions website. UC admissions for underrepresented minority students has increased since the initial drop following Prop 209, with the nine universities admitting the largest share of underrepresented minority students in its history in 2021. But the schools' student bodies are still less diverse than the California population or the cohort of high school graduates who meet UC admissions requirements. Underrepresented minorities make up about 32% of the UC fall 2024 freshman class. But they make up 46% of Californians and more than half of the state's high school graduates who meet the minimum academic requirements to get into UC schools. However schools choose to adapt, ignoring race in wholistic admissions entirely is unrealistic, said Levine, the mixed-race Stanford freshman. 'Parts of your identity can't be separated from your field of study, from your interests, from what you do,' she said. 'My identity is tied to the kinds of things I'm interested in, what I wrote my essays about to get into college. Taking out my race from that is not going to take away the fact that that is part of who I am.'
