Stories related to: crude oil

Skidding stocks sent the Dow and Nasdaq into bear territory as oil hit a record near $144 a barrel, the Wall Street Journal reports. Besides oil, bad news from GM and weak jobs data darkened the street’s mood. The Dow fell 166.75 points to 11,215.51, down 20.8% from its record high in October. A drop of 20% is the traditional threshold for a bear market. The Nasdaq fell 53.51 points to 2,251.46, and the S&P 500 fell 23.38 points to 1,261.53. More »

The markets fell today, continuing the slide that marked yesterday’s session. Investors continued to mull the tidal wave of bad news that hit the financial, tech and consumer discretionary sectors Thursday, MarketWatch reports. The Dow fell 104.46 to 11,348.96, the Nasdaq lost 5.74 to close at 2,315.63, and the S&P 500 dropped 4.68, closing at 1,278.47. More »

Oil prices climbed above $141 a barrel in Asian trading today—another record—as the dollar's protracted slump prompted investors to flock to oil as a hedge against inflation. Prices also were lifted yesterday after OPEC's president said crude prices could go higher than $150 a barrel this year and Libya said it may cut oil production. More »

The soaring cost of travel is forcing a fundamental change in the identity of America, writes Bill McKibben in the Washington Post : "The frontier of endless mobility that we've known our entire lives is closing." And that's not necessarily a bad thing, because sprawl has "eroded our sense of community with grievous results." More »

Saudi Arabia consenting to increase oil output is more public-relations ploy than problem-solver, Vivienne Walt writes in Time , since the half-million extra barrels a day won't make much of a dent, if the Saudis even have that much to spare. One analyst says the move is really an attempt “to pump out the message to the West that ‘we are not trying to hurt your economy.'" More »

Exxon Mobil is getting out of the retail gasoline business, following other major oil companies who've been selling their low-margin stations to gasoline distributors. The world's biggest publicly traded oil company plans to sell to distributors its remaining 820 company-owned stations and another 1,400 outlets operated by dealers. The transition will take years. More »

A reining-in of Asia’s demand for oil could help the global crude supply rebound, eventually dropping prices sharply, analysts tell Reuters. But the price relief likely won’t show up until the end of this year or early next, as data needed to help traders set prices is slow to flow in from major Asian countries. More »

Americans are paying more than $4 a gallon for gas for the first time, Reuters reports. The national average reached $4.005 per gallon today, up from $3.67 last month and $3.10 last year. Prices had stabilized last week, until crude oil futures jumped to record levels. In a recent survey, 74% of Americans vowed to change their driving habits in response to $4-a-gallon gas. More »

Optimists can easily chalk up Friday's disastrous day on Wall Street to a skittish market overreacting to lousy news about oil prices and unemployment. The problem, writes Ben Steverman in BusinessWeek , is that many analysts are lining up in the pessimists' camp, which holds that something more "fundamental" is awry. The credit crunch is easing, but rising inflation and an increasingly "fragile" economy could spell long-term trouble. More »

The oil price surge is just like the dot-com boom, analysts at Lehman Brothers tell the Wall Street Journal , and costs will sharply decline once the US dollar strengthens and demand dips in certain countries. Lehman claims oil is experiencing the "classic ingredients of an asset bubble," and points to the "herd" instinct of financial investors in rising prices. More »

Cash-strapped airlines are now being pressured to pay millions of dollars in advance for aviation fuel, reports the Times of London. Mandatory prepayment for fuel has become common in the US and is now moving to Europe as crude oil prices continue to rise and the solvency of the industry is uncertain. Jet fuel costs have soared 60% since January. More »

The international agency that monitors oil supplies is preparing a very pessimistic forecast of future capacity, the Wall Street Journal reports, one that heightens worries over whether producers will be able to keep pace with exploding demand for oil. The International Energy Agency, whose previous models showed steady—and predictable—growth, is revising that sharply downward, the Journal says, though the report won't be out until November. More »

A surprise 5.32 million barrel decline in US crude oil stockpiles prompted oil prices to surge past a record $135 a barrel in after-hours New York trading this morning, extending oil's runup to 19% this month, reports Bloomberg. The Energy Department also said yesterday that gasoline stockpiles had declined some 755,000 barrels, while analysts had expected an increase in reserves. More »

Oil set yet another record today, with prices hitting $130.47 a barrel in electronic trading in Asia and Europe, the AP reports, on supply concerns and renewed worries about the dollar. Crude closed at $128.98 in the last New York Mercantile Exchange session. Oil futures have roughly doubled over the past year. More »

Romancing the Saudis and railing against speculators won’t accomplish anything, Gerard Baker tells American pols in the Guardian : A second industrial revolution is driving oil prices up and there’s no turning back. Stop the populism— the "economically illiterate idea for a gas tax holiday," for instance—and the saber-rattling, and instead focus on areas, like energy efficiency, where progress is being made.  More »

Stocks performed poorly today, battered by another new oil high and bad news from AIG and Citigroup, Bloomberg reports. The Dow lost 120.90 to end at 12,745.88, with a weekly loss of 2.4%. The S&P 500 shed 9.50 to 1,388.28, while the Nasdaq dropped 5.72 to settle at 2,445.52. More »

A “super-spike” could push oil beyond $150 a barrel by October, the highest it been in more than 135 years, experts say. That would drive the price at the pump past $4.50 a gallon and trim US economic output 3.3% in the 2 years following, reports the Wall Street Journal. Crude sold for a record $121.84 yesterday, up 96% from a year ago. More »

The president of the oil-producing cartel OPEC has warned that the price of the black gold could spike as high as $200 a barrel. As crude hovered just below the $120 barrier, Chakib Khelil told an Algerian newspaper that disruptions in production in Britain and Nigeria, coupled with a weak dollar and investor speculation, will keep prices rising. More »

Stocks were mixed today as financials rallied but Microsoft dragged down the tech sector.  Nevertheless, all three major indexes recorded back-to-back weekly gains for the first time since February, Bloomberg reports. The Dow closed up 42.91 at 12,891.86, the Nasdaq dipped 5.99 to 2,422.93, and the S&P 500 rose 9.02 to 1.397.84. More »

Consumer prices rose an anticipated 0.3% in March, propelled by hikes in the costs of energy, food, and airline tickets; a commodities rush and weak dollar also pushed crude oil to a record high today. Energy costs rose 1.9% in March, the AP reports, and the past year has seen huge increases in the prices of bread (14.7%) and milk (13.3%) More »