(New York) Oil prices ended down Thursday, for lack of new concrete developments between Iran and Israel, the Islamic Republic having promised a response after a strike on the annex of its embassy in Damascus attributed to the State Hebrew.
The price of a barrel of Brent from the North Sea for delivery in June dropped 0.81%, to close at $89.74.
Its American equivalent, West Texas Intermediate (WTI), with maturity in May, fell 1.38% to $85.02.
For Sophie Lund-Yates, of Hargreaves Lansdown, the jump in US crude stocks, revealed on Wednesday, helped to relieve the market.
Commercial reserves of black gold increased by 5.8 million barrels last week, significantly more than the 800,000 barrels expected by analysts.
Operators were also concerned about the resistance of inflation in the United States, after the CPI consumer price index came out above projections on Wednesday.
If the producer price index, the PPI, published Thursday, increased less than expected in March, at 0.2% over one month compared to 0.3% announced, it shows an increase of 2.1 over one year. %, at the highest level in almost a year (April 2023).
Stubborn inflation is postponing the prospect of rate cuts from the American central bank (Fed).
“The fear of a stronger dollar and high interest rates for longer than expected offsets concerns about supply, linked to conflicts in the Middle East,” explained, in a note, José Torres, d ‘Interactive Brokers.
On Thursday, the dollar actually showed itself to be a conqueror, briefly falling below the $1.07 mark per euro, before falling back.
The operators are awaiting the response promised by Iran against Israel in retaliation for the strike which destroyed, in early April, an annex of its embassy in Damascus (Syria), an attack attributed to the Jewish state.
“If Iran carries out an attack from its territory, Israel will respond and attack Iran,” Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said in Persian.
In a telephone interview with his British counterpart, the head of Iranian diplomacy, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian affirmed that “Tehran (had) never sought to inflame tensions in the region”.
“But the Israeli regime’s terrorist attack […] and the silence of the United States and Britain encourage (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu to continue the war and expand it in the region,” he added.