A key day for oil markets as countries consider a massive release from their strategic reserves,
plus how some of the biggest hedge funds got caught off guard by the war.
These are considered sort of the first-in-class hedge funds in the industry,
and they each lost a billion or more for the week.
And the AI boom continues, powering up shares of Oracle.
It's Wednesday, March 11th.
I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News,
the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.
The journal's Matthew Dalton reports that the International Energy Agency has proposed its largest ever release of oil reserves in an effort to tame a recent run-up in crude prices with a decision expected today.
To discuss this potentially historic market intervention,
we've got Matt on the line with us from Paris today.
Matt, give us the details of this proposal and then how it came about.
So the headline figure is a release of 400 million barrels of oil onto the market by the 32 member countries of the International Energy Agency.
It would be the largest release by quite a bit that the agency has ever coordinated more than double what it put onto the market in 2022 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
This is meant to address a scenario that is kind of what the IEA was created for,
which is a catastrophic event on the oil market.
And that's what is happening right now with the near complete closure of the Strait of Hormuz due to Iranian attacks.
This came together very quickly
because IAEA member countries were pretty surprised by the whole war itself.
They weren't involved in the planning.