Yemisi Izuora/Agency Report
The speculation surrounding the possibility of an OPEC production cut have not gone away, despite the comments from Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi earlier this week.
Venezuela’s oil minister stoked the markets when he said on Thursday that representatives from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Venezuela would meet in mid-March to discuss cooperative efforts to stabilize oil prices.
Oil prices shot up more than 1 percent on the news, but there isn’t much new here to trade on.
These countries will move forward with the production freeze, but that will likely have only a limited effect on the fundamentals in the short-term. An actual production cut remains a remote possibility for now.