Oil prices spike after Saudi oilfield attack
Oil prices saw their biggest increase since 1990 as the world awaits news on the recent Saudi attack. In fact, oil prices rose as much as 20% just after the attack which the United States has blamed on Iran. Brent crude was up to $71 a barrel whilst West Texas intermediate was up to $64 a barrel. The latter rose by around 16%. Both these increases are the highest ever for a single day in three decades.
Oil production at much lower capacity
Oil production in Saudi Arabia will be way below its maximum capacity for weeks. Traders’ speculations over the extent of the outage spurred one of its biggest one-day gains. News sites unannounced that the decrease in Saudi production was as low as 5 bn bpd. To put you in the picture, this is roughly 5% of the world’s total output.
Subscribe to our newsletter to receive our weekly updates + more straight to your inbox!
Crypto continues to rally
The crypto markets showed some positive sentiment over the weekend with most coins showing slight increases. Legacy Bitcoin remained hovering around the $10,300 mark whilst Ethereum continued to build upon recent positive sentiment to settle at around the $194 mark on Monday at press time. The star performer of the past few days was EOS which was up by a considerable 8% over 48 hours to the $4.10 mark, the highest it has been in 2 months. Other coins that showed positive sentiment included BCHABC – up by 2% to the $307 level and Litecoin which breached the $71 level.
Markets in Asia open lower
During Asia-Pacific trading, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dropped 1.1 percent while China’s CSI 300 of major Shanghai- and Shenzhen-listed stocks fell 0.3 percent. Thankfully, this impact was limited due to a market holiday in Japan, which is considered to be the regional center for trading US Treasuries in Asia. However, investor unease resulted in gold climbing 1 percent to $1,503.29 an ounce.