By Peter Nurse
Investing.com -- Oil prices slumped Thursday, with aggressive monetary policy tightening and larger than expected U.S. gasoline inventories prompting demand worries while Russia’s move to return gas to Europe eased supply issues.
By 09:35 AM ET (1335 GMT), U.S. crude futures traded 3.5% lower at $96.41 a barrel, while the Brent contract fell 3.1% to $103.58.
U.S. Gasoline RBOB Futures were down 5.5% at $3.0968 a gallon.
The European Central Bank joined other central banks in aggressively raising interest rates, hiking by 50 basis points earlier Thursday, more than the 25 basis points it guided towards last month.
The ECB, like many of its peers, has decided to focus on fighting runaway inflation rather than worrying about a potential economic downturn, which could weigh on oil demand.
The crude market had already been fretting about rising U.S. gasoline stocks, as data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, released Wednesday, showed gasoline inventories rose 3.5 million barrels last week, a much sharper increase than had been expected.
This raised demand concerns at the world’s largest consumer during the peak summer driving season.
Additionally, economic growth in China, the world’s largest importer of crude, is likely to slip below 4% this year, according to the median estimate from the latest Bloomberg survey of economists.
That’s down from the prior survey estimate of 4.1%, and well below Beijing’s official target of about 5.5%, as the nation’s strict COVID-19 policy continues to weigh on the country’s economic outlook.
On the supply side, Moscow sanctioned the return of Russian gas flows to Europe via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline after a maintenance period ended earlier Thursday.
As a result, European natural gas futures fell to their lowest in three weeks as the decision allayed fears that Russia would choose for political reasons to continue the outage, meaning many European countries, and Germany in particular, would have to look elsewhere for their energy options.
Additionally, Libya's National Oil Corp stated on Wednesday that crude production had resumed at several oilfields after the lifting of force majeure on oil exports last week.