Angola is leaving the Saudi-led oil producer group OPEC, saying that the country does not gain anything from its membership. Yahoo Finance's Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton discuss how this news has impacted the oil market and tensions within OPEC.

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Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: Let's check oil prices. They are sliding today. There is the news that Angola has decided to leave the Saudi-led oil group OPEC. The country's minister told the press that the country was gaining nothing from its membership after protesting the cuts it had made to output in the last year.

It is considered a blow to the wider group. Of course, it doesn't include the US. OPEC does not include the US. And it's debatable whether the move today has-- is directly tied to Angola leaving. It was a move that was not that unexpected. Angola had been in OPEC for 16 years, but its production had been going down. It's actually-- this doesn't really change the oil output, because it was already producing at capacity. And it had been one of the OPEC nations that did not want to keep production capped or did not want to keep these production cuts in place.

JOSH LIPTON: Yeah. It's not the first country to leave, not a big producer, as you know. From what I was reading, Julie, here about 1.1 million barrels a day in November, way, way down from its peak. And they're actually already at full capacity from what I understand. So it's not as though they have the ability here to just leave, tap, and ramp really hard.

But I think it's notable also just in perhaps it tells you about the tension with an OPEC. That's what you hear people focusing on because you, obviously, will hear talk that some OPEC members have not been thrilled with the Saudis. There are some grumbling about the leadership, their intent to keep prices elevated, which they have to do, because if you want to revamp the desert kingdom, that costs a lot of money. So you do hear these tensions.

I know some are saying, listen, don't watch Angola as much. But a lot of attention is actually more on the UAE and just kind of watching the tensions there and what that means for kind of OPEC going forward.

JULIE HYMAN: Well, and then there's ex-OPEC, right? There's the US. And our output-- our output hit a record 13.3 million barrels a day last week. And so we're now a swing producer, right, when you're talking about how the oil dynamics are going to be affecting price going forward as well.

There was a larger-than-estimated build in crude inventories last week, which does tend to put a little pressure on the price. But, you know, in other words, it's not just the OPEC dynamics obviously that are going to be important to price going forward. So we're going to continue to watch that.