Oil prices stabilized on Thursday after a sharp decline on Wednesday, as the market balanced between a jump in refinery production in China, the world’s largest crude importer, and a weak economic outlook there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Brent crude futures rose only three cents, or 0.04 percent, to $73.23 a barrel by 0903 GMT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
US West Texas Intermediate crude also increased by 1 cent, or 0.01 percent, to reach $68.28 a barrel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both benchmarks fell 1.5 percent on Wednesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The market got some support after data on Thursday showed that total Chinese oil refinery output in May jumped 15.4 percent from a year earlier, the second-highest on record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the weak economic outlook cast a shadow, as growth in China’s industrial production and retail sales in May missed expectations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oil’s gains were also limited by concerns that the expected interest rate hike would slow the economies of the United States and Europe and thus lower demand for crude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Federal Reserve kept interest rates unchanged on Wednesday, but indicated that they may still need to be raised by at least half a percentage point by the end of this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, analysts expect oil prices to get some support later in the year as voluntary cuts by OPEC+ countries that began in May and additional cuts by Saudi Arabia from July coincided with the strong demand season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oil prices stabilized on Thursday after a sharp decline on Wednesday, as the market balanced between a jump in refinery production in China, the world’s largest crude importer, and a weak economic outlook there. Brent crude futures rose only three cents, or 0.04 percent, to $73.23 a barrel by 0903 GMT. US West Texas Intermediate …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":53340,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,36],"tags":[6832,10364,6885,8137,8215,10365],"class_list":["post-85427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-commodities-news","category-market-updates","tag-china","tag-economic-fears","tag-fed","tag-oil-demand","tag-oil-output","tag-oil-storage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/noortrends.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/noortrends.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/noortrends.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noortrends.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noortrends.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85427"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/noortrends.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85428,"href":"https:\/\/noortrends.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85427\/revisions\/85428"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noortrends.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/noortrends.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noortrends.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noortrends.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}