Oil Down on Concerns About Historic Cutback Deal

Meanwhile, media continues to skew its reporting of the coronavirus pandemic: File Image/PixaBay

Even though the world's largest oil producers are working towards an output cut deal to mitigate cratered demand amid the coronavirus pandemic, crude on Monday posted its first loss in three days due to worries that the output cut won't happen or won't be deep enough.

West Texas Intermediate settled down $2.26 at $26.08 per barrel, while Brent settled 3.1 percent lower at $33.05 per barrel.

Media on Monday reported that Saudi Arabia and Russia are "very close" to an agreement on cuts, and this caused Ryan Fitzmaurice, commodities strategist at Rabobank, to remark that the deal "will likely involve unprecedented cooperation between OPEC [the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] and non-OPEC oil producers.

"The bar is currently set high at 15 million barrels per day and oil prices risk giving back all if not more of the recent gains if no consensus is reached this Thursday."

According to Saudi sources, any deal the Saudi agree to will have to include OPEC, Russia, Canada, Norway, and most importantly the U.S.

Andrey Kostin, chief executive of VTB Bank, remarked, "No one is interested in low oil prices, neither the United States nor Russia, nor the Saudis; from this point of view I think there should be a reasonable agreement achieved at the end of the day."

Meanwhile on the coronavirus front, as the U.S. prepares to face its worst week prior to an expected peak in new infections, the mainstream media and top democrats are backpedalling on earlier criticism of U.S. president Donald Trump promoting hydroxychloroquine as an effective virus treament: they now agree that the drug - which has been approved for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration - is effective after all.

However, the media of both liberal and conservative persuasions continue to leave out important facts in their race to keep their death toll reporting up to date, case in point: as of Monday they reported 1,341,907 cases of the virus globally, of which 74,476 people have died and 275,883 people have been discharged from hospital.

Omitted from this are the 991,548 people who have the virus and are experiencing only mild cold-like symptoms that don't require hospitalization; in fact, data from Iceland, Italy, and other sources contend that half the people with the coronavirus show no symptoms at all.

Patrick T. Dolan, a virologist at University of California, said this is good news because it means "the virus lethality may be lower than initially thought," and although on the flip side it means that people can unknowingly spread the virus, this can be mitigated by current social distancing measures. .