Is Iran pushing Yemen rebels to attack Saudis to elevate the price of oil?

Bloomberg/Fuel Fix:
Crude erased losses as escalating conflict in the Mideast region that's home to almost half the world's oil canceled out an earlier rout in commodity markets.

Futures popped above $68 a barrel in New York on Monday after sliding as much as 1.8 percent. Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen launched unsuccessful missile attacks against Saudi Arabia while kingdom-led forces killed a senior leader of the rebel group. The flare-up countered a slump in everything from energy to metals after the U.S. softened its position on sanctions against Russian aluminum giant United Co. Rusal.

"It seems to be an escalation but Saudi Arabia has been very good at shooting these missiles down,"'said Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at Price Futures Group Inc. in Chicago. "The concern for oil really comes at what happens if it hits?"

Oil has risen more than 5 percent this month amid geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. At the same time, OPEC's cuts have continued to erode a worldwide excess. It won't be necessary to extend historic supply limits if oil prices keep rising, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said, according to the ministry's Shana news service.
...
Iran's currency has been in free fall because of concern over reimposition of US sanctions in May when Trump has said he will not renew the waivers contained in Obama's bad deal with Iran.  The Iranians may have already squandered the windfall Obama gave them for making the deal and they may need to oil revenue to sustain their operations in Syria and their preparations for attacks on Israel.

While some speculate that reimpositions of sanctions on Iran will drive up the price of oil, I doubt it.  It would be easy enough for the rest of OPEC, plus the Russians to make up the difference with increased production as well as the US.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more