Opec: An Early- Morning Truce

An Early- Morning Truce

At 3:30 a.m. last Wednesday, an exhausted Rilwanu Lukman, the Nigerian Oil Minister and president of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, emerged from a conference room at Geneva's Intercontinental Hotel to announce that the cartel had ended its longest meeting ever. After 17 days of bitter wrangling, OPEC had agreed to renew its two-month-old pact to keep oil production down in an effort to push up prices. The group intends to hold daily output to 17 million bbl. a day, up only slightly from the current 16.8 million bbl. a day.

At the start of the fractious meeting it seemed...

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