Oil futures edged lower Friday, on track to snap a run of seven straight weekly gains as worries about Chinese demand, rising bond yields and a stronger dollar take a toll.
Price action
-
West Texas Intermediate crude for September delivery
CL00,
-1.47% CL.1,
-0.80% CLU23,
-0.80%
fell 28 cents, or 0.3%, to $80.11 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, putting the U.S. benchmark on track for a weekly fall of 3.7%. -
October Brent crude
BRN00,
-0.77% BRNV23,
-0.77% ,
the global benchmark, was off 37 cents, or 0.5%, at $83.75 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe, down 3.5% for the week.
Market drivers
Renewed worries about China’s property sector alongside a continued weak run of economic data from the world’s second-largest crude oil consumer has been blamed for oil’s pullback.
See: Global investors expect China to deliver a massive fiscal stimulus. Here’s why it may never arrive.
Analysts have argued, however, that underneath the hood, China’s oil-consumption figures have held up.
“While Chinese macro data has underwhelmed over recent weeks, end-use refined product data looks far from terrible,” said Michael Tran, commodity strategist at RBC Capital Markets, in a Friday note.
“Chinese product inventories are tight and although diesel inventories have recently rebounded from the recent low, gasoline stocks have fallen for 13 consecutive weeks. Demand has been strong enough to keep product inventories subdued even with refinery utilization surging since exiting turnaround season in June,” he said.
China’s refinery run rate is clocking in at an annualized high of 14.9 million barrels a day, or mbd, an increase of 1.8 mbd year over year, Tran noted. Chinese refined product exports have remained relatively subdued, he said, with July flows tracking modestly higher on a monthly basis and softer gasoline exports offset by a moderate rise in gasoil and jet-fuel exports.
Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury yields have broken out to the upside, with the 10-year yield
BX:TMUBMUSD10Y
rising earlier this week above 4.25% to a 15-year high. The dollar has rallied alongside, with the ICE U.S. Dollar Index
DXY
up 0.7% this week and around 1.7% so far in August.
A stronger dollar can be a negative for commodities priced in the unit by making them more expensive to users of other currencies.
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