By Sharon Cho and Rakteem Katakey
“Last week ended on a high with the bullish outcome of the OPEC meeting, so it may just be a correction lower from a strong starting point,” said Jens Naervig Pedersen, a senior analyst at Danske Bank A/S in Copenhagen, referring to Monday’s oil price. It also “looks like the market is a bit anxious with no U.S.-China trade deal in place yet.”
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. raised its 2020 Brent forecast following the OPEC+ deal, saying the group was aiming to tackle the market’s short-term imbalances. Still, the prolonged U.S.-China trade war continues to hang over the market as traders await news on whether Washington will go ahead with a planned hike on Chinese imports later this month.
West Texas Intermediate for January delivery fell 57 cents to $58.63 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 8:31 a.m. local time. The contract closed at $59.20 on Friday, the highest since Sept. 17.
Brent for February settlement dropped 54 cents, or 0.8%, to $63.85 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe Exchange. The contract rose 1.6% on Friday and ended the week 3.1% higher. The global benchmark crude traded at a $5.32 premium to WTI for the same month.
Grueling Talks
Saudi Arabian Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman promised to take the kingdom’s production down to levels not seen on a sustained basis since 2014, data compiled by Bloomberg show. After two days of grueling talks in Vienna that focused on adjusting OPEC+ quotas, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait and U.A.E. were among the nations that took the largest cuts other than the Saudis.
Chinese exports to the U.S. fell 23% last month from a year earlier, the most since February. When Beijing and Washington agreed to work on a “phase-one deal” in October there was hope that it would lead to a quick resolution of at least some issues. Since then, however, negotiations have stretched out and a fresh set of U.S. tariffs is set to start on Dec. 15.
“The soft Chinese numbers have outweighed the OPEC+ cuts, once again reinforcing the heavy focus on demand at present,” said Howie Lee, an economist at Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. “With just a week left before a fresh set of U.S. tariffs kick in, there’s also a bit of apprehension in the market.”
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