Oil Moves Toward $60,
Oil prices hit a low of $33.87 about a month ago. Now there are a lot of reasons that they could top $60, coming close to doubling in less than 60 days. While the drop from $147.27 last summer was…
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The latest rise in oil prices is supposed to be based on two things. The first is a weakening dollar, which could be an issue for several months, depending on how hard the Fed will fight to combat the US liquidity and credit crisis.
The other factor is harder to gauge, which makes it more frightening. Over the last few weeks the perception has begun to emerge that the recession may be bottoming and that the global economy could pick up toward the end of the year, driving more crude consumption especially in the largest nations–the US and China. Recent data on manufacturing output would make the notion that the recession is blowing itself out unlikely. But, if consumer sentiment and business capex do not drop sharply, there will be enough anecdotal information to encourage some traders to bid oil up.
The trouble with the cycle of modestly good news leading to higher oil prices is that they could undercut any economic recovery. The low price of gas and petrochemicals has been one of the few bright spots that have benefited consumer living costs and helped manufacturing company margins. Those benefits may be coming to an end.
Douglas A. McIntrye
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
