Main News
- This week and the month of November started with a price boom of the main energy commodities in particular crude oil prices as I will present herein.
- Furthermore, this week there is also the quantitative easing decision to be made by The Federal Reserve. All eyes around the world continue to speculate about what will be the decision and how it will affect the dollar compare to the main currencies and the US economy. There is an interesting analysis made in forexcrunch.com news site about the different scenarios that could emerge from this decision.
Prices
The crude oil price of futures for December 2010 is at 83.56 USD per barrel, as of 17.46PM GMT, on the New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex), which represents a whopping 2.13 dollar increase and a 2.62% rise compare to the last business day last week.
The WTI spot price, also settled, as of 17.31PM GMT at 83.34 USD per barrel, a rise of 2.35%.
The ICE Brent crude oil futures for December 2010 reached 85.12 USD per barrel – a 2.314% percent increase as of 16.00PM GMT.
According to Bloomberg the increase in the crude oil price is due to the bets placed by Hedge funds as the supplies of gas fell. On the other hand FT.com speculate that the hype in the crude oil price in the beginning of the week is due to the Chinese growth in demand on the one hand, and the QE2 (quantitative easing) that could adversely affect the dollar compare to leading currencies along with the sluggish GDP growth rate that US data report presented in this passing Friday.
I think that once the decision about the QE2, and how it will be executed, it will be easier (well not easy, just easier) to make an educated guess about its outcome on the US economy, the dollar and the main energy commodities.
On the other hand, the natural gas prices continue to slowly descend from the four dollar mark per MMBTU; in particular, today as of 17.45PM GMT the Nymex Henry Hub Future price for December 2010 is trading at 3.87 $ which is a 4.21% decrease compare to previous business day.