Oil at April highs; U.S. rate hike fears take backseat to OPEC

Investing.com -- Pressing on with gains from four weeks, oil bulls targeted $80 per barrel for U.S. crude on Monday — and correspondingly higher prices for global benchmark Brent — as they turned what would typically be a mundane three-day stretch before a Federal Reserve rate decision into a hive activity.

Crude markets started the day in slumber mode as traders in Asia braced for the possibility of the Fed adding a quarter-point hike to rates at its July 26th meeting, after a pause last month to a monetary tightening cycle that began in March 2022. 

But as the session moved to Europe and later New York, bulls entered the market with gusto, convinced that weeks of pledges by Saudi Arabia and Russia to cut an additional million and 500,000 barrels per day, respectively, from their July production will show up in U.S. inventory data due Wednesday.

Industry analysts tracked by Investing.com are predicting that U.S. crude stockpiles could have fallen by as much as 2.4M barrels during the week ended July 21. 

The forecast comes amid expectations that refiners again turned out heavy volumes of gasoline, diesel and jet oil to the market last week in anticipation of peak demand — despite consumption data showing a weaker-than-usual uptake for fuels this summer.

“It’s still early to say what the crude consumption for last week could have been; these numbers can swing any way week by week,” said John Kilduff, analyst a New York energy hedge fund Again Capital. “Suffice to say, the gains of the past four weeks have whetted the appetite of oil bulls and they’re chasing the market higher again, turning what’s usually a quiet pre-Fed period into an explosion of activity.”

New York-based West Texas Intermediate, or WTI, for delivery in September settled up $1.67, or 2.2%, at $78.74 per barrel, after soaring earlier to $79.28, its highest since April. The U.S. crude benchmark has risen around 11% so far for July.

London-based Brent for September delivery settled up $1.67, or 2.1%, at $82.74, after a three-month peak at $82.89. Like WTI, the global crude benchmark has also gained nearly 11% on the month.

Since the Fed skipped a rate increase in June, speculation has been rife that its policy meeting this week will produce the central bank’s last hike of the year — despite projections showing there could be another before its final policy meeting on Dec. 13.

The Fed’s use of the most aggressive rate hikes in four decades to clamp down on inflation has produced excruciatingly slow results that have just started to yield after 16 months. Indeed, if the central bank stops with just one hike Wednesday, risk-on appetite could flourish from traders expecting the next big thing: rate cuts. In such an environment, oil prices could spike even more, hurting growth and rolling back hard-won gains against inflation.