Oil prices briefly tumbled more than 5% on Thursday, falling to levels not seen since before the war in Ukraine, carried away by fears of recession which threaten demand for black gold, amid record inflation in the States. United States and in the euro zone.
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Around 2:15 p.m. GMT (10:15 a.m. in Montreal), a barrel of Brent from the North Sea, for delivery in September, lost 3.67% to 95.93 dollars.
A barrel of American West Texas Intermediate (WTI), for delivery in August, fell 4.40% to 92.04 dollars.
Fears of a slowdown in demand erased the gains made following the invasion of Russia, when crude oil prices rocketed to levels not seen since the 2008 financial crisis.
The two world crude benchmarks thus returned to their levels before the invasion of Ukraine, when Brent was worth between 95 and 99 dollars a barrel and WTI was trading between 90 and 94 dollars a barrel.
Both Brent and WTI prices, however, remain up around 22% on the year, with supply disruptions and the prospect of an imminent Russian invasion having already driven prices higher in the early part of the year. year before the start of the war on February 24.
“Recession fears are once once more the engine” of the fall in prices, comments Craig Erlam, analyst at Oanda.
The European Commission on Thursday lowered its growth forecasts for the euro zone for 2022 and 2023, to 2.6% and 1.4% respectively, once morest 2.7% and 2.3% expected so far, due to the growing impact of the war in Ukraine.
Inflation has meanwhile been propelled to historic highs, with consumer price inflation estimated at 7.6% in 2022 and 4% in 2023, from 6.1% and 2.7% previously, according to forecasts from Brussels.
On Wednesday, the release of the consumer price index (CPI) in the United States in June “reinforced the prospect of an aggressive hike by the Fed (US Federal Reserve) to slow the US economy”, says Stephen Innes, of Spi.
Prices soared once more in June in the country, with inflation reaching 9.1% and climbing to the highest since November 1981. A sharp rise that threatens growth, consumption being the main driver of the US economy .
For Tamas Varga, analyst at PVM Energy, with a new rise in key rates, “the economy should contract” and growth will gradually slow down, “which will have an inevitable impact on the demand for oil”.
A rate hike would further support the dollar, which is already at levels not seen in decades once morest the yen or the euro, thus weighing on the purchasing power of investors on the oil market who use other currencies.
