The Brent oil price fell by 7.6% last week, its strongest weekly loss since early September, Commerzbank’s commodity analyst Carsten Fritsch notes.

OPEC and the IEA revise their demand forecasts further downward

“For WTI, the 8.4% drop was the largest weekly decline in more than a year. This also meant that most of the gains made in the preceding two weeks were wiped out. For one thing, the fears of an escalation in the conflict between Israel and Iran, which had been behind the previous price increase, diminished somewhat.”

“For another, OPEC and the IEA revised their demand forecasts further downward, particularly with regard to China, which again brought demand concerns more into focus. The Chinese data published by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Friday provided retrospective confirmation of this.”