settled down Oil prices Significantly in early Asian trade, today, Thursday, with investors assessing optimism related to the outlook for demand in China on the back of a possible hike in interest rates in central banks around the world.
By 01:21 GMT, Brent crude futures rose one cent to $82.71 a barrel, while West Texas Intermediate crude futures fell four cents to $77.24 a barrel, according to Archyde.com.
The market received support from the International Energy Agency’s expectations of a recovery in demand in China during the next year, following declining by 400,000 barrels per day in 2022.
The agency raised its forecast for oil demand growth in 2023 to an increase of 1.7 million barrels per day to 101.6 million barrels per day.
Data revealed that China’s land and air transport recovered sharply last month.
The market also received support this week from the leakage and outage of TC Energy’s Keystone pipeline, which transports 620,000 barrels per day of Canadian crude to the United States.
Officials said it would take at least several weeks to fix.
The US Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 50 basis points on Wednesday, down slightly from a 75 basis point hike at the previous four monetary policy meetings.
The central bank waved further rate hikes.
And US Central Bank President Jerome Powell confirmed that the bank is not considering any change to the inflation target of 2%, and does not intend to think regarding doing so in the future, indicating that it is too early to talk regarding the bank cutting interest rates.
Powell said in a press conference following the monetary policy meeting held by the Bank on Wednesday: “We do not think regarding that, and we will not think regarding that under any circumstances.. We will keep the inflation target at 2%, and we will use our tools to return inflation to 2%.”