Simon Watkins is a former senior FX trader and salesman, financial journalist, and best-selling author. He was Head of Forex Institutional Sales and Trading for Credit Lyonnais, and later Director of Forex at Bank of Montreal. He was then Head of Weekly Publications and Chief Writer for Business Monitor International, Head of Fuel Oil Products for Platts, and Global Managing Editor of Research for Renaissance Capital in Moscow. He has written extensively on oil and gas, Forex, equities, bonds, economics and geopolitics for many leading publications, and has worked as a geopolitical risk consultant for a number of major hedge funds in London, Moscow, and Dubai. In addition, he has authored five books on finance, oil, and financial markets trading published by ADVFN and available on Amazon, Apple, and Kobo.
For several years, China and Russia have been building an alternative world order to that offered by the U.S. and its allies, as analysed in…
Following two recent landmark legal rulings by the Supreme Court of the Federal Government of Iraq (FGI) in Baghdad, news emerged last week that Iraq’s…
Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant, Saudi Aramco, is looking at several further opportunities to expand its downstream dealings with China, according to recent comments from…
Despite the U.S.-led ban on importing Russian oil that some of Washington’s allies will also implement, Russian oil in significant volumes will continue to flow…
Together with its aims of becoming self-sufficient in gas and creating the pre-eminent oil storage and supply hub in the Middle East, boosting crude oil…
According to several sources close to the negotiations to resuscitate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – including a highly-placed source who works closely…
Given the historically elevated oil and gas prices that have resulted from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the lack of a meaningful shift in OPEC+…
The longer that high oil and gas prices are sustained, the greater the economic damage for highly developed and industrialized countries that are not self-sufficient…
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) reiterated last week his country’s “commitment to the ‘OPEC+’ agreement” – working alongside the agreement’s other key…
China has proven with Iran that it has much practice and great skill in working around sanctions, and the U.S. has made it even easier…
Last week’s failure of the UAE and India – along with just China – to vote in favor of the UN Security Council’s resolution to…
The spike in crude oil prices last week in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has lent further urgency to the long-running efforts to…
The Supreme Court of the Federal Government of Iraq (FGI) in Baghdad has made two landmark legal rulings that have significant, if not catastrophic, implications…
Plans for a joint Saudi Arabia-China refining and petrochemical complex to be built in northeast China that were shelved in 2020 are now being discussed…
Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant, Saudi Aramco, is in talks with senior external banking and legal advisers over the sale of up to another US$50…
At around the same time as Russian President, Vladimir Putin, had his first in-person meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, for nearly two years…
The geopolitically critical positioning of the UAE’s Fujairah as an alternative global crude oil storage facility and transit hub to the perennially troublesome Strait of…
The US$27 billion four-project deal agreed last year between French energy supermajor, TotalEnergies, and Iraq’s Oil Ministry is set to move into its ‘execution phase’…
A core strategy of both the U.S. and China in securing the dominant influence in the Middle East is to hold sway over the region’s…
China has continued to press home the geopolitical advantage given to it in Iraq following the official end of the U.S.’s ‘combat mission’ in the…