Oil, Trading and the World Economy
|Crude oil has had a spectacular 26 percent fall in price since high summer. It has broken through technical support that can be traced back to the financial crash in 2008. Several factors are behind the decline including the strengthening U.S. dollar, the ascent of the U.S. shale oil industry and rising supply in general, a relative calm around Middle Eastern oil fields, economic stagnation in Europe, a slowdown of unknown severity in China and a dimmer outlook for the global economy as a whole. Trading markets take their cue from changes in existing scenarios and the rise in the dollar has paralleled the drop in crude but it is insufficient to alone explain the price collapse. We will examine the competing fundamental and technical factors in the oil market and venture some guesses about the near term direction of the price of crude oil.
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