French President Macron stressed the need to collaborate to tackle rising fuel costs and ensure global supply of refined products

Calls from G7 leaders for coordinated action on fuel costs and against export restrictions follow a familiar template from past episodes of refined-product tightness: the political pressure point has historically been the crack spread and diesel and gasoline availability rather than crude itself, and the policy instinct has been to keep export channels open rather than let individual countries hoard supply behind border measures, since unilateral export curbs in prior episodes have tended to tighten the regional product markets of neighbours and feed back into prices. Macron has prior form here, having pushed coordinated G7 and EU responses to energy costs in earlier price spikes, and the read-across with Carney signals this is being framed at the level of the leaders' track rather than as a bilateral matter. The usual sequence in comparable episodes is rhetorical coordination first, then a working-level strand on inventories, refining capacity, and freight and insurance frictions, with joint stock releases or demand measures only if prices stay elevated. What distinguishes this from a crude story is the explicit focus on refined products, where the binding constraints have tended to be refinery throughput and trade flows rather than upstream supply. The follow-ons worth noting are whether other G7 capitals echo the no-export-restriction language and whether the statement hardens into a formal communique commitment, which is where such coordination has historically acquired or lost force.