Oil prices are rising Thursday morning, recovering from a moderate decline the day before, triggered by data on a sharp increase in U.S. oil inventories last week.
The price of April futures on London’s ICE Futures Exchange stood at $85.85 per barrel by 7:05 a.m., $0.47 (0.55%) above the previous session’s closing price. Those contracts fell by $0.2 (0.2%) to $85.38 per barrel at the close of trading on Wednesday.
The price of WTI futures for March at electronic trades of the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) is $79.16 per barrel by that time, which is $0.57 (0.73%) above the final value of the previous session. The previous day the contract fell by $0.47 (0.6%) to $78.59 per barrel.
According to the report of U.S. Department of Energy published on Wednesday, oil reserves in the country last week jumped by 16.28 million barrels. Gasoline inventories declined by 2.32 million barrels and distillates by 1.28 million barrels.
Experts expected an increase of oil reserves by 2 million barrels, gasoline reserves by 1.5 million barrels and distillates by 1 million barrels.
At the same time, the Energy Department explained that the data on oil reserves includes an upward adjustment of 1.967 million barrels per day, or about 14 million barrels for the whole week.
Matt Smith, a senior analyst at Kpler, told MarketWatch that the adjustment “was the result of previous underestimation of imports and/or production and overestimation of exports and/or refinery capacity.”
Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency (IEA) raised its forecast for oil demand growth in 2023 by 94,000 bpd, according to its monthly report.
Thus, analysts have increased the estimate of demand in 2022 compared to the previous report by 107 thousand b / s – up to 99.96 million b / s, and the forecast for 2023 increased by 202 thousand b / s – to a record 101.92 million b / s. Thus, the IEA expects global oil demand to increase by 1.96 mln bpd this year compared to 1.87 mln bpd a month earlier.
Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen has arrived in Kyiv on a visit. This is the first visit of an Israeli high-ranking official to Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion.
“I have come to say: Israel supports Ukraine and the Ukrainian people in difficult times,” Cohen wrote on his Twitter account.
During his visit, the Israeli foreign minister is scheduled to meet with President Vladimir Zelensky and Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba.
Cohen is expected to visit Bucha, Babi Yar and announce the reopening of the Israeli embassy in Kiev, which was closed due to the war.
The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) in 2022 revealed 4.5 thousand fraudulent websites that duplicate government websites in order to steal the data of Ukrainians, said deputy head of the NBU Alexei Shaban.
“Last year, the NBU revealed about 4.5 thousand such (fraudulent) resources, and this is much more than it was in 2021,” he pointed out during a press briefing on Wednesday.
According to him, the main authors of such phishing sites in Ukraine are the special services of the Russian Federation.
“If before the full-scale invasion, the cyber police recorded 15-20 thousand appeals of citizens concerning financial fraud, then in 2022, this statistic has increased by an order of magnitude,” he added.
He noted that due to the joint system of the NBU, National Cyber Security Coordination Center and mobile operator “Kyivstar” the time from detecting such sites to their blocking at the state level is 15 minutes.
“We find such resources and enter them into the system of blocking (…) The system allows you to appeal the inclusion of a resource to the blocked, but for a month of work we have not received a single such complaint, “- he pointed out.
The common project is designed to reduce user clicks on fraudulent sites by redirecting them to a page with a warning that the site was created by cybercriminals.
According to the NBU, during the first month about 120 thousand unique visits to this page were recorded.
The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has imposed sanctions on eight non-banking financial institutions in the form of an obligation to eliminate violations and contributing causes due to the failure to provide information and documents.
Such decisions were taken by the NBU’s Committee for the Supervision and Regulation of Nonbanking Financial Services Markets on February 13, the regulator’s website reports.
The measures apply to Invest Solutions Factor LLC, Financial Company Bisfactor LLC, Investrum Financial Company LLC, Simple Credit Solutions LLC, Finance Dnipro LLC, Ambras Financial Company LLC, Global Financial Services LLC, and Finaktiv Financial Company LLC.
These non-banking financial institutions are obliged to eliminate violations by March 14, 2023.
Law enforcement officers searched the office of one of Ukraine’s largest IT company MacPaw and the home of its founder Alexander Kosovan on Wednesday in connection with the land plots acquired by the company to implement an investment project.
“MacPaw’s office and my personal home were searched. Even during a full-scale war, officials find a reason, time and way to pressure Ukrainian businesses,” Kosovan said on Facebook.
According to him, the reason for the searches were questions about land plots that MacPaw legally acquired between 2016 and 2021.
“Before the searches, we provided investigators with all the necessary documents. That is, the searches in our case are an optional measure, but the civil servants decided otherwise,” he stressed.
Kosovan did not rule out that because of the imperfection of the land legislation and because of the outdated regulation “some mistakes could have been made by the officials.
According to him, the dialogue with the local authorities to correct the mistakes and create an interesting and valuable project takes more than three years on the issue of land plots, which were the reason for the searches.
“However, after we invested tens of millions of dollars in the development of the plots, the officials became interested in them, and now they are trying to take away these lands and the asset,” Kosovan said.
In turn, co-founder of monobank Oleg Gorokhovsky suggested on his Facebook page that the searches were related to the fact that “the land plots turned out to be on someone’s wish list.”
“Alexander Kosovan will not be offended. One of the most decent and dignified people I know. A philanthropist, a visionary, a patriot. I think someone simply has his land on their wish list for this year,” he said.
As Gorokhovsky stressed, MacPaw is an international company with many international awards. The company is a resident of Dia.City.
According to information in the database of court decisions, law enforcers have claims to MacPaw Property Management LLC in connection with the implementation of the construction project of the recreation complex “IT-Relax” on the territory of Tsyblivska village united community (Boryspil district of Kyiv region). Criminal proceedings were opened in June 2021. The main charges were inappropriate use of agricultural land and construction of real estate within 100 meters of the Dnieper River’s regulatory and coastal protective strip.
Founded by Kosovan in 2008, MacPaw is a software development company. Its main products are CleanMyMac X, ClearVPN, Setapp and Gemini, Unarchiver. Declared number of users exceeds 30 million.
Top managers of the largest Wall Street banks in recent days gave more optimistic assessments of the prospects for the U.S. economy compared with previous forecasts, writes the Financial Times.
In particular, bankers now see a higher probability that the Federal Reserve will be able to provide a so-called “soft landing,” that is, to combat high inflation, while managing to avoid recession.
“The consensus among corporate executives has shifted slightly in a more positive direction. The sagging economy is now expected to be milder than many expected six months ago,” Goldman Sachs Group chief David Solomon said Tuesday at an event hosted by Credit Suisse.
A positive tone also prevailed in a speech by Bank of America Corp. Brian Moynihan, who noted the high consumer activity and resilient profitability of mid-cap companies.
“Consumers have money. They have jobs, they’re spending money and taking out loans,” Moynihan said at a conference on financial services.
Wells Fargo Chief Financial Officer Michael Santomassimo also pointed to “very good consumer spending data.”
Such comments contrasted with statements by bank executives last year when they expressed serious concerns about the state of the U.S. economy, notes the FT.
Despite the growth of optimism, grounds for concern remain. In particular, the head of Goldman Sachs said that the future trajectory of inflation is still unclear, high rates of growth in consumer prices can be observed for quite some time, which will affect the economy as a whole.
“I think we’re going to see weaker, slower growth for a while,” Solomon said.
Earlier, the Club of Experts consolidated and analyzed economic indicators of Ukraine and the world, more details in the video at the link
