Price raise as fears over Russia and Libya increase
While today investors will be following the central banks' speakers, news from the Russia-Ukraine conflict with riots in Libya, increasing the concerns about Oil lower supply.
Today, Christine Lagarde from ECB, FED Chair Jerome Powell, and BoE governor Mr. Baily will take part and speak in a panel discussion at the IMF-World Bank meeting. Their comments will be studied closely for clues to future central banks' monetary policies.
Last night on Wednesday in Europe, one of the most important economies had a tough night. French President Emmanuel Macron and far-right challenger Marine Le Pen had a debate. They have different outlooks and comments on the economy and international relations. Since France is the second biggest EU economy, it will be vital to see who will lead it.
US futures and European stock markets broadly edged higher Thursday with these outlooks, while earlier Asian markets mostly closed in the red.
On the Russia and Ukraine conflict front, G7 finance ministers plan to provide additional support to Ukraine by more than 24 billion US dollars. They also emphasized that sanctions "have the intended massive impact." on the Russian economy. Russian army carelessly to this news and sanctions, continuing to advance, and Mariupol port was already fully occupied.
On the other hand, with increasing concerns in Ukraine, Libya says that they are losing more than 550,000 barrels per day of oil output because of blockades.
In addition, Tuesday and Wednesday, we had the API, and EIA reports. On Wednesday, the US Energy Information Administration inventory data also confirmed the API worrying report with a draw of 8 million barrels for the week ended April 15.
On the opposite side, concerns over the latest outbreak of COVID19 and its restrictions in China created some doubts about the import of Chinese companies, which weighed on the prices. However, the latest reports are about slowly easing of strict.
After all, and so far today, Brent crude futures rose 1.2% to $108 and WTI crude futures 1% to 103.20 a barrel. From the technical point of view, Oil is still holding its trading range between 94 and 108 US dollars, while the general uptrend has not been violated yet. For now, we cannot see any signal for prices out of this range.
