Oil futures steadied early Wednesday as investors awaited congressional testimony by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell amid worries over tightening monetary policy by major central banks and the outlook for global energy demand.
Price action
-
West Texas Intermediate crude for August delivery
CL.1,
-0.07% CL00,
-0.07% CLQ23,
-0.07%
rose 1 cent to $71.20 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. -
August Brent crude
BRN00,
-0.09% BRNQ23,
-0.09% ,
the global benchmark, was down 2 cents at $75.88 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe. -
Back on Nymex, July gasoline
RBN23,
-1.10%
fell 1% to $2.584 a gallon, while July heating oil
HON23,
+0.07%
edged up 0.2% to $2.48 a gallon. -
July natural gas
NGN23,
+0.84%
rose 1.2% to $2.523 per million British thermal units.
Market drivers
Powell will testify before lawmakers at 10 a.m. Eastern. The Fed last week left its policy interest rate unchanged, pausing an aggressive cycle of rate hikes that took the fed-funds rate from near zero to its current range of 5% to 5.25% since March 2022. However, Powell last week also indicated the Fed has more work to do to bring down inflation, while forecasts by individual policy makers pointed to the need for two more quarter percentage point rises in the fed-funds rate this year.
See: ‘Confused’ markets get another chance to hear Fed’s Powell ‘flesh things out’ on 2023 rate path
Oil remains “fairly rangebound,” with cuts by OPEC+ doing little to push prices higher as worries abut the demand outlook continue to put a cap on the market, said Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey, commodity strategists at ING, in a Wednesday note.
“In recent weeks there has been increasing concern over China’s demand outlook, despite Chinese oil demand indicators looking fairly good up until now,” they said, noting that China’s National Petroleum Corporation expects domestic oil demand to grow 3.5% year-over-year in 2023, down from a forecast of 5.1% in March.
“China’s demand outlook is crucial for the global market, given that the bulk of global demand growth this year is expected to be driven by China. Significantly weaker Chinese demand would also mean that the global oil balance would not be as tight as currently expected over the second half of 2023,” the strategists wrote.
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