Energy

Anne-Marie Slaughter, the president of New America Foundation, says the Russians hacked the presidential election and the U.S. needs to respond, but the national trauma of 9/11 and the Iraq War has made the U.S. more timid and reluctant to use force. Prior to that, Deutsche Bank’s Sebastien Galy says the catalyst for a stronger dollar will be better data in the U.S. Then, Tony Dwyer, Canaccord Genuity’s chief market strategist, says you should never sell until you’re in close proximity to a recession. Nicholas Burns, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, says you need to work across borders to counter modern terrorism. Finally, Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of University of California, Irvine’s School of Law, says Neil Gorsuch is smart and articulate but isn’t answering many questions in Congress.

The agreement to freeze production was geopolitical not economic, writes Meghan O’Sullivan in the Financial Times.

With a few exceptions, the consensus emerging from last week’s inconclusive Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries meeting is that if OPEC is not dead, it is at least in a coma.  This may be a reasonable judgment based on the group’s ability to take collective action on a production cut to bolster the price of oil in the short run. 

Fears that events in Iraq will send global oil prices soaring have abated. Yet, the crisis has potentially huge implications for oil. Under any conceivable outcome to the current situation, oil production from Iraq will fail to meet recent expectations. The reason for this dire prognosis is that politics – not security or logistics – will be the biggest determinant of Iraq’s oil trajectory in the years ahead.