Oil fell on Friday but still ended the week higher after US President Donald Trump said that he was “very close” to a trade pact with China, but warned that Beijing wants the deal more.
Futures slipped 1.4 percent in New York and rose 0.1 percent for the week, marking the third straight weekly increase.
Meanwhile, the US dollar strengthened, diminishing the appeal of dollar-denominated commodities.
Photo: Reuters
“What’s going to be important is any follow-through conversation or comments from the Trump administration regarding the trade deal and if there’s going to be anything to progress on that front,” said Josh Graves, senior market strategist at R.J. O’Brien & Associates LLC in Chicago. “There’s a lot of general skepticism right now.”
Oil has rebounded by about US$5 since early last month as fears of a potential global recession have receded, and on hopes for a breakthrough in the trade standoff.
Yet, negotiations between Washington and Beijing have taken longer than expected, and concerns that surging US supplies and constrained demand growth will unleash a new surplus have kept crude prices about 13 percent below this year’s peak.
“The first part of a trade war easing is yet to be agreed and has taken longer than expected, making markets fear that the deal would evaporate,” Global Risk Management analyst Ltd Michael Poulsen said.
West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for January delivery fell US$0.81 to settle at US$57.77 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract is up 0.09 percent for the week.
Brent for January settlement lost US$0.58 to close at US$63.39 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe Exchange, up 0.14 percent for the week
The global benchmark crude traded at a US$5.62 premium to WTI.
“We were weak all morning and this inability to hold US$58 is significant on a technical trading basis,” said John Kilduff, partner at Again Capital LLC in New York.
Trump’s comments on China are “another negative concern for the market,” he said.
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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts