No Doha agreement to freeze oil production. Brent falls 4.5%

The price of Brent crude dropped $2 to $41 as trading opened on Monday following a failure of the Doha talks to end in agreement to freeze oil production. It had been hoped that after failing in December, that the OPEC producers may have found some common ground in order to better negotiate with non-OPEC producers like Russia.  However, Iran, who have recently boosted their export forecasts didn’t even send a delegate to the talks, further undermining hopes that some progress had been made behind the scenes over the last few weeks. The fall in oil triggered a rush to safer assets including bonds and the Yen which both rose with Asian and European stocks opening lower.