Saudi Arabia continues to keep the market informed about its stance on the OPEC production cut deal, with Khalid al-Falih’s latest guidance that Saudi would prefer to overtighten the market than exit early from cuts (channeling Neil Young’s ‘it’s better to burn out than fade away’). Al-Falih has gained a great deal of credibility over the last three-quarters of a year by outlining Saudi’s next move in terms of exports, then following through on it. We should therefore take heed from his latest comments. Al-Falih also signaled that the kingdom will continue to keep its crude exports in check next month, holding below 7 million barrels per day. This is no surprise, and will be their stance until at least the Saudi Aramco IPO. We can see from our ClipperData that a good deal of OPEC’s success in lowering OECD inventories has been by directing exports to emerging markets […]