Opec: more of the same

Extending the cuts for nine months is designed to kill off the stock glut, but the pledge to keep going will buoy tight oil

Opec and its partners outside the group are sticking with the plan, convinced they will succeed in eliminating the global stock glut. But in extending their deal for nine months, to end-March 2017, they have accepted the market's judgement: the rebalancing process will take longer than they wanted or expected. Had they ended the deal as planned at end-2017, Saudi Arabia's oil minister Khalid al-Falih said, Opec's producers would have added "a large slug" of supply to the market, creating another hefty stock build. Oil ministers also discussed deeper cuts in the meeting, in Vienna on 25 May, as well as a 12-month extension. But new quotas would take weeks of preparatory negotiations, which ha