Yesterday’s broadly unchanged settlement prices hide an eventful day, volatile price action with Brent moving in a range of $2.27/bbl. It is reasonable to assume that it was a day of assessing the potential impacts of recent events, namely the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah and Donald Trump’s latest salvo of threatening its closest trading partners with new tariffs.
Considering the almost immeasurable amount of uncertainty that keeps investors constantly on the edge of their seats, markets are susceptible to sudden reversals and twists of fate. Amongst the many factors that helped oil prices rally last week was the war Israel wages against Hamas and Hezbollah. In a somewhat sudden and unexpected U-turn, the news broke yesterday afternoon that a ceasefire agreement, initially possibly for 60 days, between the Jewish state and the Lebanese paramilitary group is within grasp and can be finalized in the next few days.
Winds of changes in politics inevitably have a profound impact on everyday life and financial markets. And last week was absolutely and unreservedly awful – not price-wise but global security-wise. There was no significant development on the economic front, per se, and our market was also reasonably uneventful, perhaps apart from the brief interruption in oil output at the Johan Sverdrup oil field.
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