Oil heads back toward $133 a barrel
Oil rose to near $133 a barrel yesterday on worries about global petroleum supplies and the outlook for the US dollar.
The dollar has weakened over the last week after a modest recovery, and investors will be watching economic data out of the United States to be released over the next few days for further clues about the health of the world's biggest economy.
Oil and other hard commodities are seen as hedges against a weakening greenback and inflation. Also, a weak dollar, the currency of international oil trade, makes petroleum products less expensive to Asian and European buyers.
This week, investors will be watching for what implications US consumer confidence, new home sales, gross domestic product and other economic data might have for the dollar and oil prices, he said.
Late afternoon in Singapore, light, sweet crude for July delivery was up 77 cents at $132.96 a barrel in electronic trade on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose $1.38 to settle at $132.19 a barrel on Friday.
Nymex floor trading was closed yesterday for Memorial Day.
Soaring oil prices are increasingly the result of speculation, financier George Soros said in an interview published yesterday.
The billionaire investor said the money pouring into the oil market increasingly had the look of a bubble, but that it would not burst until both the US and UK were knocked into a recession.
"Speculation... is increasingly affecting the price," Soros was quoted as saying by The Daily Telegraph.
Agencies
(China Daily 05/27/2008 page17)
