Oil at April highs; U.S. rate hike fears take backseat to OPEC
Investing.com — Pressing on with gains from four weeks, oil bulls targeted $80 per barrel for U.S. crude on Monday — and correspondingly higher prices for global benchmark Brent — as they turned what would typically be a mundane three-day stretch before a Federal Reserve rate decision into a hive activity.
Crude markets started the day in slumber mode as traders in Asia braced for the possibility of the Fed adding a quarter-point hike to rates at its July 26th meeting, after a pause last month to a monetary tightening cycle that began in March 2022.
But as the session moved to Europe and later New York, bulls entered the market with gusto, convinced that weeks of pledges by Saudi Arabia and Russia to cut an additional million and 500,000 barrels per day, respectively, from their July production will show up in U.S. inventory data due Wednesday.
Industry analysts tracked by Investing.com are predicting that U.S. crude stockpiles could have fallen by as much as 2.4M barrels during the week ended July 21.
The forecast comes amid expectations that refiners again turned out heavy volumes of gasoline, diesel and jet oil to the market last week in anticipation of peak demand — despite consumption data showing a weaker-than-usual uptake for fuels this summer.
“It’s still early to say what the crude consumption for last week could have been; these numbers can swing any way week by week,” said John Kilduff, analyst a New York energy hedge fund Again Capital. “Suffice to say, the gains of the past four weeks have whetted the appetite of oil bulls and they’re chasing the market higher again, turning what’s usually a quiet pre-Fed period into an explosion of activity.”
New York-based West Texas Intermediate, or WTI, for delivery in
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