00:00Oil prices are slumping, as President Donald Trump says a fresh round of peace talks will start later today.
00:06He also suggested that a deal on reopening the Strait of Hormuz may be close.
00:11His comments come after he called off a planned attack on Iran,
00:16partly due to pleas from U.S. allies in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia.
00:21What we're doing is we're talking to them in the form of a negotiation.
00:25It begins tomorrow afternoon, and we'll see if it's true.
00:28I'd love to do that, save a lot of lives, save a lot of unnecessary power, to be honest with
00:36you.
00:36It would take many, many years to ever build it back.
00:39I don't think it would be even buildable back.
00:41So we had an attack that would be the biggest attack since World War II.
00:50For more, we're now bringing in Stuart Livingstone, Wallace Bloomberg's executive editor for the Middle East, North Africa, and Russia.
00:58Stuart, we've been here before, multiple times over the past few months.
01:02What makes this time around different, or is it different?
01:06It's quite similar, although I will say there is one slightly different thing this time,
01:11which is that Iran and Oman seem to be making progress on some sort of mechanism for controlling Hormuz,
01:17whether that's governing it or coming up with a new route through it or demining it.
01:23We don't quite know.
01:24So if that element of it can be fixed and you can get some sort of system in place where
01:28shipping can go through Hormuz again,
01:30I think that removes probably the biggest obstacle we have to those wider talks around the nuclear file and so
01:36on and so forth.
01:36Like, there is a template for nuclear.
01:38Hormuz is by far the most pressing problem.
01:41And speaking of it, what does the movement there look at this time?
01:45And then what's also probably different this time around is we're seeing other risks to other waterways in the region.
01:52So when it comes to movement in the Strait of Hormuz per se, what does it look like at the
01:58time being?
01:58Very sporadic.
01:59I mean, it's largely where it's been most of the time since the end of February, which is a few
02:03tankers are getting through.
02:05Very hard to detect them until they're quite a long way off.
02:07But it's a trickle.
02:08I mean, it really is a trickle.
02:09And in terms of the global oil market, the context here is we're something like 400 to 600 million barrels
02:16lower on global inventories than we were at the end of February.
02:20It has an awful long ways to go before we get back up to so-called normal levels.
02:24And then OPEC also raised output slightly yesterday, 188 barrels.
02:29Yeah.
02:30Does that move the needle?
02:31No.
02:32I mean, it's entirely theoretical because basically the ones with the spare capacity are struggling to get their barrels out.
02:37What it does do is it sets the stage potentially.
02:39If you can fix Hormuz, then that gives them some headroom to accelerate that production and accelerate those exports and
02:45we can get back to a normal situation at a much faster speed.
02:48So it makes sense.
02:49You know, it's not to downplay it.
02:50But does it fix anything this week?
02:51Absolutely not.
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