Around noon, Brent fell 0.68% to 85.56 dollars and WTI lost 0.72% to 78.17 dollars.
Oil prices on Monday continued their decline of the past week due to an increasingly gloomy economic outlook, raising fears for crude demand.
Around 10:00 GMT (12:00 CET), a barrel of Brent from the North Sea for November delivery fell 0.68% to 85.56 dollars.
The barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) American for delivery the same month, lost 0.72% to 78.17 dollars. “The price of oil has fallen considerably from the peaks reached in recent months,” said Richard Hunter, analyst at Interactive Investor.
“The combination of the rising dollar and the perception of a lack of demand due to recession fears has driven the price down,” he continues, although this price drop also reduces “an element of inflationary pressure “.
Crude is “on the verge of losing all the gains of 2022 (…) due to the deterioration of the global economic outlook and the rise of the dollar”, supports John Plassard, analyst at Mirabaud.
Since the beginning of 2022, Brent is up around 9%, and its American counterpart WTI by around 3%, far from their March peak at $139.13 and $130.50 respectively, approaching their all-time highs. a few days following the start of the war in Ukraine.
If the Russian invasion of Ukraine was the main driver of the peaks reached by black gold in March because of a possible lack of hydrocarbon supply, for analysts it is now responsible for the fall in prices, in having “pushed the world to the brink of recession,” said Tamas Varga of PVM Energy.
The rise in commodity prices has dramatically increased the cost of living and several major central banks are trying to put out “by all means” these “inflationary fires”, he continues, with an aggressive tightening of their policies. monetary as in the United States last week.
The OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) has moreover revised its global growth forecast sharply downwards for next year under the effect of more lasting consequences than anticipated from the war in Ukraine, especially in the euro, and the rise in central bank interest rates to contain inflation.
Some countries like the United Kingdom are already in recession, according to the Bank of England in particular or the PMI Flash Composite index from S&P Global, when many others are very close to it.