Thursday, September 20, 2018 18.42PM / By
As Brent Crude prices have been slowly
creeping up to the $80 mark for a week, U.S. President Donald Trump took to
Twitter again to slam OPEC about pushing prices higher, sending oil down early
on Thursday.
“We protect the countries of the Middle
East, they would not be safe for very long without us, and yet they continue to
push for higher and higher oil prices! We will remember. The OPEC monopoly must
get prices down now!” President Trump tweeted
in his latest rant against the cartel for keeping prices high.
After relatively calm trading earlier in
the day in which oil prices were slightly up, Brent and WTI took a turn
downward after Trump’s tweet, and at 10:30 a.m. EDT, WTI Crude was down 0.28
percent at $70.57 and Brent
Crude was down 0.67 percent at $78.39.
Source:
OilPrice.com
In July, President Trump sent out his
fourth tweet
about high oil prices and OPEC in as many months.
“The OPEC Monopoly must remember that gas
prices are up & they are doing little to help. If anything, they are
driving prices higher as the United States defends many of their members for
very little $’s. This must be a two way street. REDUCE PRICING NOW!”
President Trump started criticizing
OPEC for manipulating prices in April, when oil reached highs last seen at
the end of 2014.
On the day of the OPEC meeting in June
when the cartel was discussing whether to boost production to offset expected
losses from Iran and Venezuela, President Trump tweeted
again: “Hope OPEC will increase output substantially. Need to keep prices
down!”
Related: Saudi
Oil Inventories Continue To Plummet
Today’s verbal Twitter chastisement of
OPEC comes just days before OPEC and its Russia-led non-OPEC partners in the
production cut deal meet in Algiers this weekend to review the state of the oil
market.
The cartel and its allies will discuss
how to divvy up the 1 million bpd production increase they pledged in June, but
no further immediate action is planned, OPEC sources have told Reuters.
So far this week, oil prices have trended
higher, first on reports of Saudi Arabia being
okay with letting Brent Crude above $80, which had the market wondering if
the Saudis would lift 18production further in the coming months to offset
supply losses from Iran, and then with the EIA reporting on Wednesday crude
and gasoline draws for the week to September 14.
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