Don’t look to OPEC for oil price relief

Don’t look to OPEC for relief from what increasingly looks to be permanently higher oil prices. At its meeting last week, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, responsible for roughly 40 per cent of global crude-oil production, merely flirted with increasing output levels. And major OPEC producers and traditional price hawks Venezuela and Iran refused even to contemplate such a move.

But that’s not the truly discouraging news from OPEC, which is consuming much higher levels of its own production, leaving less for potential export increases.
In something of a vicious circle