West Texas Intermediate crude fell amid speculation that weakening manufacturing from Germany to China will cap global oil demand. Brent declined in London.
Futures dropped as much as 1.2 percent from the Aug. 29 close. Floor trading in New York was shut for the Labor Day holiday, and transactions will be booked for settlement purposes today. Purchasing manufacturing indexes for Germany, Italy, the U.K. and China all came in below estimates for August, while OPEC’s output increased to the highest level in a year.
“All eyes are on the demand side, and weaker statistics for example in China are bearish,” Bjarne Schieldrop, chief commodity analyst in Oslo at SEB AB, said by telephone. “The increase in tension between Russia and Ukraine is bearish for oil” because economic sanctions on Russia may eventually result in a slowdown in Europe, he said.
WTI for October delivery declined as much as $1.19 to $94.77 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange and was at $94.88 at 1:46 p.m. London time. The volume of all futures traded was more than double the 100-day average for the time of day. Prices decreased 2.3 percent last month and are down 3.6 percent this year.
Brent for October settlement was $1.11 lower at $101.68 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. The European benchmark crude traded at a premium of $6.83 to WTI, compared with a close of $7.23 on Aug. 29.
via Bloomberg
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Alfonso Esparza
trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
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