PHOTO: Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh with counterparts from Venezuela, Iraq, and Qatar in Tehran on Wednesday


This week there have been a flurry of meetings among leading oil producers about whether to restrict supply to shore up the falling global price, now at between $30 and $35 per barrel from a peak of $115 in June 2014.

At the center of the discussions was the question of whether Iran would support a restriction in production or — trying to recover a 40% fall in exports since 2012 — it would insist on its goal of an increase of 500,000 barrels per day in sales.

At the end of the day, the outcome was inconclusive. Tehran maintained the double message that it would work with OPEC for the limits on output while, at the same time, it hailed a post-sanctions boost in exports to Europe.

I explained the situation, and assessed what might happen next, in a Thursday morning interview with Monocle 24’s The Globalist.

Listen from 6:08:

Iran is doing two things at once. On the one hand, it does not want to break from OPEC and expand output so much that it collapses prices farther. On the other, it is telling its own people that, as sanctions have been lifted, we are going to restore the exports we had in 2012.