THE HINDU Editorial Vocabulary- October 3, 2016- Topic 2
The agreement reached at the extraordinary meeting of the Organisation of
the Petroleum Exporting Countries, in Algiers, to trim the cartel’s collective
output by about 700,000 barrels a day, in an effort to balance supply and
demand in the global oil market, caught markets by surprise. It was
well-acknowledged that the group needed to take decisive action to staunch the
two-year-long slide in global crude prices, that saw Brent prices more than
halve from about $103 a barrel in end-August 2014 to $45.45 a barrel on
September 1 this year. Still, it was unclear if there could be a meaningful
consensus on production cuts among disparate member-countries — which included
the small-yet-prosperous West African country of Gabon, crisis-hit Venezuela,
and fractious West Asian nations such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. That the
56-year-old grouping arrived at an agreement, albeit after leaving a decision
on country-specific production targets to November, reflects just how desperate
the situation had become for most oil-producing economies. The output cut,
announced for the first time in eight years, is a tacit admission by the
group’s largest producer Saudi Arabia that its ‘pump-at-will’ approach has hurt
its economy as much, if not more, than the pain it may have caused North
American oil producers, including U.S. shale interests, that the policy largely
sought to target.
While the big U.S. shale producers have resiliently hung on and even begun
investing in new acreage this year, Saudi Arabia found itself with a huge hole
in its budget. A fiscal deficit of 16 per cent of GDP in 2015 that is projected
to slightly narrow to about 13 per cent this year forced spending cuts,
including on wages and fuel subsidies. This year the kingdom was driven to make
its first overseas borrowing in more than a decade, a five-year $10 billion
loan. With the economy’s growth set to slow to about 1 per cent in 2016, it had
few options but to return to the main fuel of its economic engine, crude oil.
Given the country’s involvement in conflicts across the region, both openly as
in Yemen and tacitly as in Syria, its rulers have possibly realised the need to
squeeze more revenue out of every barrel of oil. OPEC reportedly made a
concession to Iran in order to win its involvement in the deal by exempting it
from immediate production caps. With demand growth for petroleum slowing far
more rapidly than previously predicted, the success of the production curbs in
reviving oil prices will significantly hinge on cartel discipline — something
that has often been lacking in the past.
Vocabulary
Trim: neat and smart in appearance; in good order.
Example: She kept her husband's clothes neat and trim
Synonyms: neat, tidy, neat and tidy, orderly, in (good)
order, uncluttered, well-kept
Decisive: settling an issue; producing a definite result.
Example: The Supreme Court voided the statute by a decisive 7–2 vote
Synonyms: deciding, conclusive, determining, key, pivotal, critical, crucial
Halve: divide into two parts of equal or roughly equal size.
Example: Peel and halve the pears
Consensus: general agreement.
Example: A consensus of opinion among judges
Synonyms: agreement, harmony, concurrence, accord, unity, unanimity
Prosperous: successful in material terms;
flourishing financially.
Example: Prosperous middle-class professionals
Desperate: feeling, showing, or involving a hopeless sense that a
situation is so bad as to be impossible to deal with.
Example: A desperate sadness enveloped Ruth
Synonyms: despairing, hopeless, anguished, distressed, wretched, desolate
Tacit: understood or implied without being stated.
Example: Your silence may be taken to mean tacit agreement
Synonyms: implicit, understood, implied, hinted, suggested, unspoken, unstated
Acreage: an area of land, typically when used for agricultural
purposes, but not necessarily measured in acres.
Example: A 35% increase in net acreage
Conflicts: a serious disagreement or argument, typically a
protracted one.
Example: The eternal conflict between the sexes
Synonyms: dispute, quarrel, squabble, disagreement, dissension, clash, discord
Squeeze: an act of pressing something with one's fingers.
Example: A gentle squeeze of the trigger
Synonyms: press, pinch, nip, grasp, grip, clutch, hug, clasp
Predicted: say or estimate that (a specified thing) will happen in
the future or will be a consequence of something.
Example: It is too early to predict a result
Synonyms: forecast, foretell, foresee, prophesy, anticipate, tell
in advance
Hinge: attach or join with or as if with a hinge.
Example: The ironing board was set into the wall and hinged at the bottom
Cartel: an association of manufacturers or suppliers with the
purpose of maintaining prices at a high level and restricting competition.
Example: The Colombian drug cartels
