On Wednesday, Ben Bernanke said the Federal Reserve will maintain its bond-buying program for now. It will start reducing bond purchases later this year and end them in 2014, if the economy continues to improve and unemployment will decline at a staisfactory pace.
In China, the world’s second largest oil consumer, the preliminary manufacturing PMI released by HSBC showed activity in the sector will be the lowest since September.
- Crude is trading at the time of writing around $96.58 a barrel after falling $1.66
- Brent is trading around $104.40 a barrel after falling $1.72
Also weighing on prices is the Energy Information Administration report that indicated that U.S. crude inventories rose unexpectedly the week before last by 313,000 barrels. Gasoline inventories rose by 183,000 barrels and distillates, including heating oil and diesel, fell by 489,000 barrels.
Norway`s Statoil said that some production fields connected to the Oseberg oil field resumed work after an outage on Monday, easing the upside pressures on prices. Iran said it plans to increase oil production by 45% by the end of 2014 to 4.5 million bpd.
- Natural gas traded at $3.939 per cubic feet after falling 0.61%
- Gasoline traded at $2.8425 a gallon after falling 1.73%
- Heating oil traded at $2.9304 a gallon after falling 1.42%