Around 4:15 p.m., 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.
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”.