Good morning from the newsroom of the Financial Times.

Today is Monday, March 9th, and this is your F.T. news briefing.

About 16 million people are locked down in Italy's wealthy northern region

in an effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus,

and one of the largest banks in the foreign exchange market is cutting a huge portion of its trading platforms.

Plus we'll take a look as the EU and Turkey battle over the plight of Syrian refugees.

But first, last week's proposed oil production cuts by OPEC collapsed, triggering a plunge

in the oil price.

The FT's Angela Rival explains the backdrop.

I'm Mark Filipino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

So OPEC and Russia were meeting on Friday and in theory all they had to do was sign off on something

that had been agreed by Saudi Arabia and its OPEC peers.

But this ultimatum that was issued by the kingdom

essentially backfired.

Russia said, nope, we're not gonna sign up.

The reason for that, on the surface of it,

they said they wanted to see what the real impact

of coronavirus would be on oil demand.

That was the impression they gave in the meeting. but actually there was a sense that there was something bigger at hand.

Really what Russia was doing was saying, you know what, this is an opportunity for us to hit at US shale companies. Any production cuts that big producers such as

OPEC and Russia were enacting were only benefiting these producers on the other

side of the world and actually you know what we're done with doing them and so they

...