Macroeconomic issues will come back to the fore in due course and will have a palpable impact on oil prices again. These days, however, US retail sales or jobless claims are being confined to the back of traders’ minds (they were encouraging, by the way) and so are upbeat Chinese GDP figures (+5.4% for 4Q 2024). Attention is still firmly on geopolitical issues.
On the face of it, yesterday's US Inventory Report was something of a mixed bag as the build in Gasoline stocks of 5.8mb and 3mb in Distillate would ordinarily have compensated for the 1.96mb draw in Crude inventory. However, due to another anomaly where imports of Crude into the US fell by 1.3mb and exports increased by 1mb, holdings in the base oil show a little historical sparsity.
There are growing concerns about the state of the global economy with bond markets recently under pressure, stocks declining and the dollar in demand. Macro factors, nonetheless, have been swept aside in the last few days as market players solely focused on evaluating Friday’s announcement from the Biden administration on imposing damaging sanctions on Russia and its shadow tanker fleet.
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