Oil quotations are weakly rising on Friday morning after a moderate rise in prices at the end of the previous session.
The value of August futures for Brent on London’s ICE Futures Exchange stood at $74.49 a barrel by 8:02 a.m., $0.15 (0.2%) above the previous session’s closing price. Those contracts rose $0.31 (0.4%) to $74.34 a barrel on Thursday.
The price of WTI crude futures for August at electronic trades of New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) increased by that time by $0.01, to $69.87 per barrel. The day before these contracts rose $0.3 (0.4%) to $69.86 a barrel.
Oil gets support from strong statistical data from the U.S. and signals about reduction of fuel reserves in the country.
On the eve of the U.S. Department of Commerce raised its estimate of the country’s GDP growth in January-March to 2% in annual terms from the previously announced 1.3%.
A day earlier it became known that oil reserves in the States last week fell by 9.6 million barrels instead of the expected decline by 4.8 million barrels, according to experts polled by S & P Global Commodity Insights.
Expectations of further monetary policy tightening by the leading central banks of the world are restraining factor for oil quotations.
Fed chairman Jerome Powell said earlier this week that most U.S. central bankers see the possibility of at least two more hikes in the benchmark interest rate. For her part, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said there was a high probability of a rate hike in the eurozone in July.
