Daily Oil Fundamentals

Japanese Dodgeball

23 Jan 2026

Japanese Dodgeball

The hand wringing seen by the Bank of Japan has led to the bank’s favourite exercise in deploying deferment. Governor Kazuo Ueda will have to step rather gently when addressing the future because of the recent selloffs in domestic bonds and the Yen. Keeping rates unchanged today might buy time while Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi goes about her snap election to confirm the appetite for plans to increase stimulus, but it will not alleviate a market-wide concern that troubles are being bottled up for the future.

Daily Oil Fundamentals

If it’s madness, is there a method to it?

22 Jan 2026

If it’s madness, is there a method to it?

Those with ample time on their hands were treated to almost three hours of Donald Trump over the past two days: one hour and forty minutes on Tuesday, marking his first year in office, and around one hour at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland yesterday. Both were astonishing to watch and listen to. They were full of unsubstantiated claims (“ending eight wars”), obsessions (the Nobel Peace Prize), assumptions disguised as objective realities (“only the United States can protect Greenland”), as well as insults, untrue assertions (“Somalia is not a country”), and disturbing confusion (he referred to Greenland as Iceland four times).

Daily Oil Fundamentals

It's All in a Day's Words

21 Jan 2026

It's All in a Day's Words

Well, it is that time of year again to recognise D-Day. No not that one, where thousands of lives were lost forming a bridgehead that threw over tyranny, the one in Switzerland where the powerful and the elite pontificate on grand matters and prescribe to, and chastise us on behaviour from the stairwells of private jets. But the only address worthy of tuning into at Davos will be that of the US President. Which Donald Tump turns up will determine the path of markets for the rest of the week until he once again outshines whatever words used with the next set of outrage. The stage is perfectly set for the Donald; the audience has been whipped up into a frenzy by his preceding bellicose and boorish attitude to the annexation of Greenland and his posts on social media are so inflammatory that one can only compare them with something from unmentionable regimes of the 1930s.