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Why the OPEC Supply Cuts Make a Recession More Likely

This week, OPEC+ announced that it will cut its oil supply further, in response to falling oil prices. This unexpected cut will increase the price of oil in the following weeks.


This move by OPEC+ makes the Fed's soft landing even harder to accomplish. The oil prices are most likely to increase the costs of producers and lead them to supply fewer goods and services. This creates something called supply push inflation, which happens when the aggregate supply curve shifts inwards, increasing prices, and unemployment, and decreasing the output in an economy.


Supply push inflation is stagflation, perhaps the most undesirable thing for monetary policy as it leaves them with a worse tradeoff between inflation and unemployment than before, so a rise in commodity prices is a central banker's nightmare.


This also means that the Fed might have to compensate harder for inflation by raising rates more, and makes a recession a bigger possibility, combined with the banking crisis.

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