Last week the Trump administration announced that it will not be renewing six-month waivers granted to eight countries to continue buying limited quantities of Iranian oil, a move that shocked experts and sent the global oil market up for a bumpy week. Trump is walking a tightrope, as he tries to completely cut off Iran from international oil markets and thereby put the nation’s economy under pressure to push Tehran to bow to U.S. demands while also attempting to keep gas prices low in the United States. This was already a tough balance to strike, but it has been made nearly impossible now that it’s been discovered that Russia has been exporting contaminated crude oil, clogging up European refineries and making an already fragile oil market even more volatile than before. Last week, after crude oil coming out of the Ural Mountains through the Druzhba pipeline was discovered to […]