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© Reuters. Investing.com – Oil began 2019 trading weakly in Asia and Europe before surging more than 3% early in the New York session after Bloomberg reported a deliberate squeeze by Saudi Arabia of its shipments to the United States and China last month.
U.S. crude was up $1.35, or 3%, at $46.76 per barrel.
U.K. traded , the global oil benchmark, rose $1.43, or 2.7%, to $55.23.
WTI ended 2018 down 25% and Brent about 20% lower. Before Wednesday’s midmorning rebound in New York, both crude benchmarks were down as much as 2%.
“Let OPEC’s fun and games begin now that 2019 is here,” said John Kilduff, partner at New York energy hedge fund Again Capital. “We’re going to see lots of volatility as their production cuts face off with whatever weak demand projected for oil amid the global slowdown everyone’s talking about.”
OPEC, disappointed that the market had barely recovered on its early December pledge to cut 1.2 million barrels per day in supplies with Russia’s help, said toward end of last month that it was planning an extraordinary meeting in April (ostensibly for another round of production cuts) to apply more upward pressure on the market.
Oil had virtually mirrored equities on Wall Street in the last few weeks of 2018, falling and rising on global recession worries and powerful dip-buying prompted by global macro factors, rather than crude production outages in Libya and Venezuela.
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Source: Investing.com
