Crude Holds Onto Gains, OPEC Meets Later Today

Oil prices have held onto their gains from Monday/Tuesday and have edged slightly higher during APAC trading in anticipation of today’s OPEC meeting and news that US inventories fell last week . WTI is up moderately to $85.18/bbl after rising to an intraday high of $85.64 early in the session. Brent is 0.1% higher at $89.02/bbl as it edges closer to $90. The USD index is slightly lower.

• Today OPEC+ will meet online but no change is expected as delegates said current quotas were appropriate and not all members have been committed to output cuts. A decision on whether to extend the cuts into Q3 is likely to be made in early June.
• Bloomberg reported that there was an inventory drawdown of 2.29mn barrels of crude in the US last week, according to people familiar with the API data. Gasoline stocks fell 1.46mn barrels and distillate -2.55mn. Later today the official EIA data is released.
• The US announced that it would not be purchasing crude for the strategic petroleum reserve in Louisiana due to be delivered in August/September, as it has to consider value for tax payers. WTI is up around 18% this year.
• Later Fed Chair Powell speaks on the economic outlook and Bostic, Bowman, Goolsbee, Barr and Kugler also appear. On the data front, there are US March services ISM/PMI and ADP employment, and euro area March preliminary CPI (see MNI Euro Area CPI Preview) and February unemployment.