Welcome back to the Great Game – our geopolitical newsletter.

Recently, the world economic has been all 70’s – everything revolves around inflation and oil! And this week was no different as OPEC announced significant production cuts in a surprise move. You can read our financial analysis in our upcoming Energy Cable (coming soon on this site!) – in this piece, we will try to analyze the decision processes and the network of global interests and strategies driving OPEC at the moment.

The official OPEC explanation is that the countries are acting preemptively to ensure stability in the oil market moving forward. This is of course a euphemism for keeping prices high and we shouldn’t disregard that explanation per se, but we should definitely look closer and deeper. OPEC of course also denies political motivations, but that’s just a standard phrase. We must understand why the announcement was made now and who drove the decision process.

Why now?

Most analysts (including myself) were taken completely by surprise at the timing and context of the announcement. There were no OPEC meetings or conferences announced, so why now?