Crude oil futures sank for a fourth straight day on Friday, settling beneath US$43 a barrel for the first time in nearly three months and capping a 14 percent decline for the week.
Market sentiment about the supply-demand fundamentals shifted most dramatically on Wednesday, when prices fell more than 7 percent amid rising inventories of heating oil and mild fall weather in the US. The selling then fed on itself, analysts said, due to technical and speculative trading.
"The scare is over and that just means the market is going back to where it belongs," said Ed Silliere, vice president of technical research at Energy Merchant Corp in New York. "We are more than well supplied and by that I mean there are not enough buyers for the product that's out there, for a while."
Light, sweet crude for January was down US$0.71 to US$42.54 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange -- about 23 percent below October's peak settlement price of US$55.17 per barrel.
The price of oil is still 37 percent higher than a year ago, putting the greatest financial pressure on low-income families, chemical manufacturers and the airline industry.
In London, Brent for delivery in January was down US$0.79 to US$39.36 a barrel on the International Petroleum Exchange.
Petroleum prices have been high all year due to strong global demand, a tight supply cushion and fears of output disruptions in Iraq, Nigeria and Russia. In September, a strong hurricane knocked out significant oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, though the region's output is now recovering.
OPEC has been producing at a rate of more than 30 million barrels a day since September, analysts say, and that is also easing supply concerns. The cartel meets on Dec. 10 and price hawks such as Iran are calling for a reduction in output levels. While analysts do not expect OPEC to announce a production cut, at least for the time being, they say the group could decide informally to take some supply off the market.
A lot will depend on where prices go between now and next Friday. If US government data scheduled to be released on Wednesday show another increase in crude and heating oil, that could trigger more selling, said Jamal Qureshi, market analyst at PFC Energy in Washington.
Heating oil futures on Friday fell to US$1.248 per gallon, putting prices 14 percent lower than the beginning of the week and 20 percent below the October peak.
The most recent government data show residential heating oil prices averaging US$2.02 per gallon nationwide as of Nov. 29. That's about 60 percent higher than a year ago.
Nymex crude tumbled more than US$2 a barrel on Thursday and more than US$3 on Wednesday after the Energy Department reported that the nation's supply of distillate fuel, which includes heating oil, grew by 2.3 million barrels last week to 117.9 million barrels. Prices also declined on Tuesday in anticipation of the report.
Crude oil inventories grew by 900,000 barrels last week to 293.3 million barrels, or 10 million barrels more than a year ago.
In spite of rising supplies, the nationwide inventory of distillate is about 13 percent below last year's levels. As a result, analysts have warned that prices could go higher again if the North American winter begins to bite.
Supply disruptions elsewhere could also put upward pressure on prices since the amount of excess production capacity worldwide is only about 1 percent higher than daily demand.
"There is fundamental weakness in the market right now because of the strong growth in supply, but event-driven price strength is not a thing of the past," said Jim Burkhard, global oil director at Cambridge Energy Research Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
There are lingering concerns about possibly supply glitches in major-producer Iraq, where insurgents have repeatedly targeted oil infrastructure as they battle US and local forces and Russian production where producer Yukos is locked in a bitter and protracted battle with the Moscow authorities over billions of dollars in unpaid taxes.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained