Oil set its biggest weekly gain in more than three months as the worst fears over the Omicron strain of SARS-CoV-2 have receded.
West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures climbed 8.2 percent this week.
Fuel consumption so far has escaped any major blows from the Omicron variant. Yet confidence is limited. Rallies are still punctuated by sell-offs such as that on Thursday after rising infection rates prompted some governments to tighten travel restrictions.
“Crude prices are having a good week as Omicron jitters have eased and as the 2022 growth outlook for the US economy remains mostly undeterred,” Oanda Corp senior market analyst Ed Moya said.
Oil has seen a remarkable turnaround after tumbling into a bear market on Tuesday last week, following a multiweek plunge.
WTI crude for January delivery rose US$0.73 to US$71.67 a barrel on Friday, up 8.2 percent weekly.
Brent crude for February delivery on Friday rose US$0.73 to US$75.15 per barrel, rising 7.5 percent weekly.
Concerns persist over the Omicron variant, which one study indicates is 4.2 times more transmissible than the Delta strain in its early stages.
Some signs of weakness are emerging. Traders are facing the prospect of a weakening physical market for crude in Asia, despite Saudi Arabia’s move to increase oil prices for next month.
The prompt timespread for global benchmark Brent has also narrowed this week, pointing bearish sentiments.
Many parts of the eastern US, including New Jersey and Connecticut, are seeing a rise in hospitalizations. The City of London might be on the verge of becoming a ghost town again after firms started telling thousands of staff to work from home in response to the latest UK government guidance.
In the US, consumer prices rose last month at the fastest annual pace in nearly 40 years, magnifying persistent inflation and with consumers facing the biggest jump in energy bills in more than a decade. The inflation headline numbers continue to add pressure for the US Federal Reserve to tighten monetary policy.
In related news, the first oil from US President Joe Biden’s release from the country’s emergency crude reserves is being granted to Exxon Mobil Corp.
The company is to receive 4.8 million barrels of oil from the US’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of an exchange, the US Department of Energy said Friday on its Web site.
The release is part of the Biden administration’s effort to lower energy costs and tackle surging gasoline prices, which touched a seven-year high last month.
Additional reporting by AP
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS