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Oil Holds Losses Below $56 After Trump Warns Against High Prices

Donald Trump resumed his attacks on OPEC, saying the world is too fragile to handle a price hike.

Oil Holds Losses Below $56 After Trump Warns Against High Prices
U.S. President Donald Trump points to the audience after speaking during a prison reform summit in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C. (Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- Oil held losses below $56 a barrel after tumbling the most in four weeks as U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted that prices are too high and called on OPEC to “relax and take it easy.”

Futures in New York were little changed after declining 3.1 percent on Monday. Trump’s war of words with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries punctuated big price swings last year, as he pressured the group to keep the taps open to help consumers. On Monday, he warned the world cannot take a price hike.

The tweet “basically pricked the balloon that had propelled prices up so much last week,” said Tamar Essner, an analyst at Nasdaq Inc. in New York. Oil has rallied “largely on news that Saudi in particular was going to focus on cutting back exports and going above and beyond what they originally pledged to do back in December.”

The president’s intervention trimmed the price rally this year to about 22 percent. Gains had been driven by production cuts from OPEC and its allies, diminishing fears about the economic impact of the U.S.-China trade war and Washington’s imposition of sanctions on Venezuelan oil shipments. Now pressure from Trump once again puts Saudi Arabia and the rest of OPEC in a bind.

In terms of recent price action, both the American and international benchmarks have been sitting near overbought territory. On Friday, the 14-day relative strength index for London-traded Brent futures climbed to near 70, a key level.

Trump “has been successful at talking the market lower, no doubt about that,” said Bob Yawger, director of the futures division at Mizuho Securities USA. With oil close or in overbought territory, “you needed that spark and that spark was his tweet this morning slamming OPEC, more or less.”

Oil Holds Losses Below $56 After Trump Warns Against High Prices

West Texas Intermediate for April delivery traded at $55.44 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, down 4 cents, at 8:41 a.m. in Tokyo. The contract slid $1.78 to $55.48 on Monday, the lowest level since Feb. 14.

Brent for April settlement dropped $2.36 to $64.76 on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange on Monday. The global benchmark crude closed the session at a $9.28 premium over WTI.

“We might see a less aggressive stance on supply cuts from the Saudis -- this might stop them from cutting deeper,” said Giovanni Staunovo, an analyst at UBS Group AG in Zurich. “But I still think Saudi Arabia has the incentive to see higher oil prices, and deliver the cuts agreed in December,” when OPEC and its partners agreed to remove 1.2 million barrels a day.

The risk to OPEC comes in the form of the so-called No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act, or NOPEC, a bill resurrected by U.S. legislators that would make the organization subject to the Sherman antitrust law used more than a century ago to break up John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust.

Congressional support for the bill intensified last year as oil prices neared a four-year high, and Trump publicly blasted OPEC. In the past, the White House has opposed the NOPEC legislation -- both George W. Bush and Barack Obama threatened to veto it. OPEC’s concern now is that Trump may break with his predecessors.

Trump, before becoming president, didn’t just support the NOPEC bill, he was a cheerleader for it. “We can start by suing OPEC for violating antitrust laws,” he wrote in his 2011 book “Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again.”

Trump’s latest tweet comes on the eve of International Petroleum Week, which opens in London on Tuesday. The annual event gathers the who’s who of the oil market for several days of conferences, deal-making and cocktail parties.

The president last tweeted about OPEC on Dec. 5 -- the day before the cartel met in Vienna -- calling on it to “keep oil flowing as is.” However, the group defied his exhortation, announcing a production cut that was deeper than expected.

Saudi Arabia itself has slashed oil shipments to the U.S. to a four-week average of just 515,000 barrels a day, down almost 30 percent from a year ago and approaching the lowest level in a decade.

Ministers from key OPEC nations and their allies will meet for a review of their output-cut accord in Baku on March 18, before a main policy-setting meeting in Vienna a month later.

Other oil-market news:
  • U.S. crude inventories probably rose 3 million barrels last week, according to a Bloomberg survey of analysts before Energy Information Administration data due Wednesday. 
  • Russia continued the gradual pace of its OPEC+ oil-output cuts in February, with official data showing a smaller reduction so far than Energy Minister Alexander Novak had promised.
  • Oil prices could potentially rise as much as 13 percent from current levels, though the rally may prove fleeting, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

--With assistance from Tsuyoshi Inajima.

To contact the reporters on this story: James Herron in London at jherron9@bloomberg.net;Javier Blas in London at jblas3@bloomberg.net;Grant Smith in London at gsmith52@bloomberg.net;Jessica Summers in New York at jsummers24@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Herron at jherron9@bloomberg.net, ;Simon Casey at scasey4@bloomberg.net, Andrew Hobbs, Jason Rogers

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