Well this is laughable.

With crude prices having already recovered fully from their early March swoon, someone in Riyadh apparently thought we needed a little but more of a push ahead of this afternoon’s API data. Here’s the headline:

And the reaction was swift and predictable:

Of course jawboning has a generally short shelf life so this will probably be faded quickly, but really we’re not sure why the Saudis are bothering with dropping hints about production cut extensions. After all, if they really wanted to drive up prices, they’d just send a little more money and a couple of pallets of ammo to their Sunni proxies in Syria, because the only thing that’s been able to produce a sustained upturn in oil prices of late is “war”…