by David M Herszenhorn and Florian Eder at Politico
Behind the free-trading façade of the G7, there’s now more than a whiff of Gosplan, the old Soviet central planning committee.
Like price-fixing apparatchiks, leaders of the G7, the world’s industrialized democracies, convened in the Bavarian Alps for their annual meeting with a plan to impose a price cap on Russian oil. Their goal was to cut off revenues that are bankrolling President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, while also aiming to limit inflation for their own citizens.
French President Emmanuel Macron, however, decided that such targeted market manipulation was not the way to go. Instead, he rolled out a head-spinning alternative on Monday — calling for a worldwide cap on oil prices that would require the cooperation, or coercion, of major suppliers, including countries such as Saudi Arabia and Nigeria that belong to the OPEC producers’ cartel.
The U.S., which originally proposed the narrower Russian price cap and is currently the world’s biggest oil producer, was blindsided by the French plan. U.S. officials at the summit were exasperated, but not surprised by Macron’s plan, and said they believed the French president would ultimately come round but that it might take a while to hash through details and get a deal.
Germany, which is more accustomed to Macron’s pie-in-the-sky proposals…
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