Oil holds near multi-year highs on Iran supply concerns

Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif sought further talks after failing to win any concrete assurance to help tackle the USA threat of economic sanctions over its nuclear program.

The output agreement between OPEC and its allies may soon fall apart due to President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out from the nuclear agreement with Iran.

“It’s really annoying that the Iranian government is never blamed for the really bad decisions they have taken lately concerning business, and only the sanctions are blamed”, she said. “Iranian is not the only crude”.

Iran said it had asked Europe’s Airbus to announce whether it would go ahead with a plane deal with Tehran following the US pullout. One of the reasons why the price of oil has been inching up has been, in fact, the prospect of losing Iran’s oil supply.

According to reliable reports, the U.S. Treasury Secretary confirmed that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have reached a considerable level of political understanding.

China and India bought more than half of the oil after sanctions were lifted in January 2016.

Iran’s hardliners are already mobilising against any concessions to Europe, with Ahmed Khatami, a senior cleric, told a crowd at Tehran University that European nations could not be trusted.

Tehran has also recently started exporting 100,000 barrels a day of its crude to Russian Federation.

In a Twitter post on Saturday, Trump said the nuclear deal helped Iran to boost its military budget.

The EU is scrambling to find ways to safeguard huge business deals with Iran, amid the threat of USA penalties. Le Maire asked. “Or do we want to say we have our economic interests, we consider we will continue to do trade with Iran?”

But as of Friday, companies in Europe said they were still taking Iranian oil.

Since 2015, Cramer has supported multiple bills to enact sanctions, while also speaking out on Iran’s diplomatic failures.

India has made efforts to improve relations with Iran, including making major infrastructure investments, and India will be uneager to curtail a significant portion of its oil imports from its third-largest supplier.

To be able to continue to purchase Iranian oil while sanctions were in place, China, for example, established the Bank of Kunlun to handle Chinese payments.

The reapplication of USA sanctions – particularly if effective – likely marks the practical end of the supply cut agreement as OPEC operates through unanimous decision-making, and Saudi and Iranian oil market interests will grow increasingly divergent.

But while slogans of “Death to America” were few, many Iranians are sincerely angry over Trump’s decision and are siding with hard-liners who long have warned to be suspicious of the West.

When sanctions were loosened against Tehran in 2016, India ramped up imports from Iran to nearly 900,000 bpd in late 2016, but intake has fallen back to around 500,000 bpd since the start of the year. The extra demand is helping to wipe out an oil glut that has plagued markets.