CAN OPEC MAKE IT?
Despite its fresh ambitions to revive the crude prices, “OPEC has not been successful in being ahead of demand destruction, which has caused a drop in oil prices which is starting to have an impact on non-OPEC supply,” Olivier Jakob, an oil analyst at Petromatrix, a Switzerland-based oil consultancy, told Xinhua. The oil cartel slashed its oil output on Sept. 10 by 520,000 bpd and another 1.5 million bpd on Oct. 24, but in vain. Both of them failed to forge substantial rallies. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) forecast in November that the economy of the United States, the biggest oil consumer, will shrink by 0.9 percent next year with contraction in the first half of the year giving way to a “languid” recovery. Prior to the meeting, the U.S. Federal Reserve decided Tuesday in a surprise move to cut the benchmark interest rate to a range of zero to 0.25 percent, the lowest level ever seen to prevent the country’s ailing economy from plunging into deep re
