Crude oil futures ended Tuesday with back-to-back losses, partly on expectations that the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates high for an extended period as the central bank waits for renewed progress in lowering inflation.
Despite the precedence for this Heading into the Memorial Day weekend, retail gasoline prices fell for the fourth straight week to $3.58 per gallon on Monday, the EIA said in its update on gasoline and diesel fuel.
In an effort to ensure adequate supplies flow into the northeastern United States, the Department of Energy has announced plans to do so Selling approximately 1M barrels of gasoline of gasoline supply reserves in the Northeast, which are scheduled to be closed in keeping with a law passed by Congress in March.
The reserve was approved in 2014, two years after Hurricane Sandy destroyed refineries and left some New York gas stations without fuel, but the cache, held at commercial storage terminals in Maine and New Jersey, has been stored. Never used.
While the Biden administration said the move would lower prices at gas stations, Bloomberg reported that selling 1 million barrels likely wouldn't make much of a difference in the East Coast region, which consumed more than 3 million barrels per day of gasoline in June of last year.
Front-month Nymex crude (CL1:COM) closed for June delivery -0.7% to $79.26 per barrel, and July Brent crude (CO1:COM) closed the earliest. -1% To $82.88 per barrel
Nymex's first-month natural gas delivery (NG1:COM) also ended for June -2.9% to $2.671 per MBtu, retreating from a four-month high and snapping a four-session winning streak.
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Goldman Sachs analysts made no change to their targets for the price of Brent crude, sticking to previous expectations that Brent crude would generally trade below $90 a barrel this year, but they said they were “somewhat optimistic” about oil prices ahead of the OPEC+ meeting on the first. From June. .
Perhaps the most bullish component of the report, according to Dow Jones, is light long positions in the crude oil market, with Goldman saying long positions among money managers are at new lows, leaving room for a bullish “mean retracement.” That positions will be back to historical standards over time.