XOM - Crude Oil is in Freefall as Russia Plays Chicken With OPEC
The crude oil sell-off has gone from bad to worse. Brent futures are on track to lose 9% on March 6, while West Texas crude is down 9.5% with only a couple of hours remaining in the final trading session of the week. Today's massive drop was started by news that Russia wasn't prepared to play ball with OPEC, which had proposed a 1.5 million-barrel daily cut by OPEC and its OPEC+ partners, of which Russia is most-prominent.
The proposal included 1 million barrels of daily production that OPEC member states had agreed to take, with the additional half-million daily barrels in cuts to come from Russia and the other non-OPEC members of the OPEC+ group. Russia would be expected to bear the brunt of most of those extra cuts, and so far is proving unwilling to do so.
Image source: Getty Images.