Oil prices slipped on Thursday as an escalating trade dispute between the United States and China outweighed the bullish impact of a decline in U.S. commercial crude inventories. <\/p>\n
Benchmark Brent crude oil was down 35 cents a barrel at $74.43 by 0935 GMT. U.S. light crude was 10 cents lower at $67.76.<\/p>\n
The trade dispute between the United States and China deepened on Thursday with the imposition of 25 percent tariffs on $16 billion worth of each other’s goods.<\/p>\n
The world’s two largest economies have now slapped tariffs on a combined $100 billion of products since early July, with more in the pipeline, adding to risks to global economic growth.<\/p>\n
Washington is holding hearings this week on a proposed list of another $200 billion worth of Chinese imports to face duties, to which China is almost certain to respond. <\/p>\n
“These (overall) measures are expected to shave up to 0.3-0.5 percentage points from China’s real GDP growth in 2019,” said rating agency Moody’s Investor Service. “For the U.S. … trade restrictions will trim off about one quarter of a percentage point from real GDP growth to 2.3 percent in 2019.”<\/p>\n
Oil demand is closely linked to economic activity and the trade dispute has already led analysts to trim their forecasts for future energy consumption.<\/p>\n
But while the outlook for oil demand growth may be moderating, some markets are tight.<\/p>\n
U.S. commercial crude oil inventories fell by 5.8 million barrels in the week to Aug. 17 to 408.36 million barrels, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in its weekly report.<\/p>\n
“This week’s report was bullish for crude,” said Societe Generale oil analyst Michael Wittner. “Crude stocks drew due to sharply lower crude imports and near-record refinery crude runs.”<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, U.S. oil production is rising as shale output increases, reaching 11 million barrels per day last week, the EIA report said.<\/p>\n
That means the world’s three top producers, Russia, the United States and Saudi Arabia, now all pump around 11 million bpd, meeting a third of global demand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oil prices slipped on Thursday as an escalating trade dispute between the United States and China outweighed the bullish impact of a decline in U.S. commercial crude inventories. Benchmark Brent crude oil was down 35 cents a barrel at $74.43 by 0935 GMT. U.S. light crude was 10 cents lower at $67.76. The trade dispute between the United States and China deepened on Thursday with the imposition of 25 percent tariffs on $16 billion worth of each other’s goods. The world’s two largest economies have now slapped tariffs on a combined $100 billion of products since early July, with more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-176925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oil-gas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176925\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}