Oil prices dropped a bit today, after a government report showed that inventories unexpectedly rose last week.According to today's report from the Commerce Department, oil inventories rose by 200,000 barrels last week. Going into today's report analysts had forecast a 1.1 million barrel drop in supplies.
This week's report is in stark contrast to last week's report that showed a huge dip in inventories and lead to a sharp increase in oil prices. Last week we saw a 8.4 million barrel decline which was mostly attributed to lower imports.
Today's news pushed oil down 62 cents to $71.43, which is still close to 130% higher than where they were at the start of the year. Today's selling continues the 3% sell off that the market had yesterday as concerns over the recession continue to weigh on oil traders.
What is on most of minds is gasoline prices. Last night the national average remained virtually unchanged at $2.662 a gallon for regular unleaded, still well below the levels we were seeing this time last summer.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-26-2009 @ 8:38PM
sgentilejr said...
Weekly inventory reports are TOTALLY MEANINGLESS.
One supertanker can hold as much as 8 million barrels of crude oil. Thus a variation of 8 million barrels (more or less) just means that one less supertanker unloaded it's cargo of crude oil in the USA during the week.
We import over 25 million barrels of oil per day, 7 days per week.. So of course there will always be some weeks when more ships unload and some weeks when less ships unload. What is important is watching the amounts of gasoline, diesel and heating oil USED inside the USA to determine if DEMAND is going up, down or holding steady.