Originally Posted by
Dayuhan
As usual with stuff flying around on Twitter, this is suspect: there's no indicated source for the data and no actual transactions cited. The figures would represent a very large deviation from the normal Brent/Urals price spread, and that alone makes them questionable.
When you see a referemce to a specific transaction: i.e. a Urals cargo in the Baltic or Mediterranean sold on x day at dated Brent minus y... then you know the actual price, what people are paying instead of what someone says they are paying. I would not trust such information via Twitter, unless linked to a credible source.
The US was never a significant buyer of Russian oil; domestic production is primarily displacing Venezuelan and Nigerian production. That oil will go somewhere of course, and will compete with Russian oil for buyers.
The Saudis have cut 400k bbl/day. It's not clear how far they are willing to go. So far OPEC seems to be treating it as normal fluctuation, no special meetings to discuss production cuts or any similar indications of alarm.
Which Swedes? Again, don't take it seriously unless specific transaction data is reported.
Yes, it is, though the extent of the problem remains difficult to quantify. That still leaves the question of how any of this relates to the Ukraine. I don't see Putin backing down just because he suddenly has an unanticipated money problem: it might even make him more aggressive. It's not as if backing down in the Ukraine will push oil prices back up again. The oil price problem and the woeful state of the Russian oil industry will be there no matter what happens in the Ukraine, so it's hard to see it as a major influence on the decision making process there.
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