No One Knows -- May 9, 2018

Before the announcement, CNBC said Iran would take, at most, only 500,000 bopd off the global market, not the 1.5 million bopd that Obama's sanctions took off the market.

From the May 7, 2018, post:

From CNBC:

Iran sanctions seen having limited impact on oil market if Trump scraps nuclear deal. Summary (note: one of the four bullets below was not written by CNBC, as far as I know):

• President Donald Trump may restore sanctions on Iran later this week, putting the fate of the Iran nuclear deal in peril
• however, analysts say the sanctions will only have a limited impact on the oil market because some importers like China and India will refuse to cut shipments
• many analysts believe Trump can shrink Iranian shipments by 300,000 to 500,000 barrels a day, compared with the 1 million to 1.5 million barrels the Obama administration achieved
• < Trump says he has no plans to send Iran $400 million in unmarked $100 bills over the weekend

Now, after Trump announces his decision, at least one analyst, over at Bloomberg, says 1.5 million bopd will be taken off the global market.

Scott Adams: "facts don't matter."

Having said that, my comments remain unchanged:

At the end of the day, no one really knows how much oil Iran is producing or selling.  Our own API and EIA can't even get the same numbers for weekly US crude inventories, released one day apart. Does one truly think anyone outside of Allah knows how much crude oil Iran is producing, consuming, exporting? LOL.

And whether it is 1.5 million OBAMA barrels or 300,000 TRUMP bbls, neither number has any effect on a global market of 100 million bbls production. Shutting down the DAPL would pretty much shut down much of North Dakota and the world would notice that either.

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North Korea Has Released Americans From Prison

I assume MSNBC is reporting that the "legwork" for setting this in motion was done by Rodman and the Obama administration, and it's taken Trump another full year to get this done when he could have gotten it done during his first month, had he not been so distracted.

Whatever.

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Something To Talk About

Timeline For The Archives

Timeline: some weeks ago, Germany's Merkel and France's Merkel came to the US to talk to President Trump about Iran; obviously, by the time they left, they would have known his position.

Some days before Trump made his announcement, it was obvious Trump had made up his mind, assuming one was paying attention.

During the 24 hours leading up to the announcement and on the day of the announcement, it was noted that SecState Pompeo was not alongside the president when the announcement was going to be made and when the announcement was made.  

The NYT called Pompeo AWOL for one of the most important announcements ever.

In fact, Pompeo was in North Korea for at least two reasons: a) Pompeo successfully closed the deal on the release of three American prisoners and is accompanying them home to Washington, DC (they arrive "tonight" at 2:00 a.m.); and, to "finalize" the date and location of the summit between Kim Jong-Un and President Trump -- which I think is even more noteworthy and newsworthy than the Iran announcement.  

Fox News broke the story but the google app won't "take" links for Fox News.