Oil Bulls Seek $90 Brent as US Summer Nears Exhaustion
The race is on for $90 oil. But summer, the season Americans like driving the most, is almost over and will wrap in less than three weeks when the fall season begins on Sept. 23.
Typically, at this time of year, crude prices would retreat slightly, sometimes meaningfully, in tandem with lower demand in the world’s largest oil consumer.
Not this time, maybe. The Arabs, who control much of the world’s oil exports, are fixated on getting to triple-digit pricing, something a barrel had not seen since August 2022, when Brent crude hovered above $105, after reaching nearly $140 in March that year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
On Friday, the London-traded global benchmark for oil settled at a little below $89. New York-traded West Texas Intermediate, or WTI, the benchmark for US crude, finished slightly above $85.
In Monday’s early trade in Asia, crude prices fell slightly.
Most analysts think oil longs will not back off until Brent takes out the $90 target — with just a couple of dollars left, it appears the target is more academic than anything else — and US crude gets as close as possible to that level too.
“That there is still plenty of momentum so close to $90 a barrel may suggest we could see a strong push to break above which would represent a big shift in the market dynamic in quite a short period of time,” analysts at Oanda wrote in a note.
The question is, what comes after that?
As said earlier, with the advent of fall or autumn, US driving activity will begin to lessen, and the deceleration will heighten as the weather gradually turns colder, heading into the winter months. The chill will, of course, bring its own attendant demand for heating.
Even so, the period between now and late October/early
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