Over the holiday weekend, after intense pressure from the leader of the free world, Russia, OPEC and other oil producing nations agreed to an extraordinary production cut of nearly 10 million barrels. This is approximately 10 percent of the global supply and is hoped to boost prices in the face of an unprecedented price war and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic crisis. The cut is the deepest ever agreed by the world's oil producers.
As part of the deal, OPEC + plus others (a total of 23 nations) agreed to let Mexico reduce its output by just 10,000 barrels a month. While Mexico’s cut in production was far less than what was proposed, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mexican President, said that Donald Trump had offered to cut US production by 250,000 barrels per day to compensate for Mexico. Trump did confirm that he spoke to the Mexican President and agreed to a cut, saying that ‘It's a small amount for us, a large amount for Mexico’. He added that Mexico would reimburse the US at a later date.
After the announcement, Trump tweeted that the deal he brokered ‘will save hundreds of thousands of energy jobs in the United States’ and added, he ‘would like to thank and congratulate President Putin of Russia and King Salman of Saudi Arabia’.
Later Trump took to social media again saying that the cuts could go ever further than those announced. He tweeted ‘Having been involved in the negotiations, to put it mildly, the number that OPEC+ is looking to cut is 20 million barrels a day, not the 10 million that is generally being reported. If anything near this happens, and the World gets back to business from the Covid 19 disaster…’.