Oil Falls After Kurds Retake Largest Dam

Brent crude fell as Kurdish and Iraqi forces took control of the country’s largest dam from Islamist militants. West Texas Intermediate fell in New York.

Futures dropped as much as 1.4 percent in London, matching the loss last week. Kurdish forces and government units have taken over the Mosul Dam entirely, an Iraqi military spokesman said on state-sponsored Iraqiya television, while a spokesman for Sunni tribes supporting the militants said that fighting continued on its eastern side. Production in Libya increased to 540,000 barrels a day as the port of Es Sider prepared to ship crude, according to National Oil Corp.

“Prices are sliding again and likely to break into fresh low ground, perhaps today, certainly this week,” Christopher Bellew, senior broker at Jefferies International Ltd., said by e-mail. “The civil war in northern Iraq has stabilized without the Islamic State moving towards Baghdad. Although IS seems to be contained, they are far from defeated, and it looks like we are in this for a long time.”

Brent for October settlement slid as much as $1.43 to $102.10 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange, and was at $102.30 at 1:38 p.m. local time. The volume of all futures traded was about 30 percent below the 100-day average for the time of day. Prices are down 7.7 percent this year.

WTI for September delivery decreased as much as $1.11, or 1.1 percent, to $96.24 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The October contract of the U.S. benchmark crude was at a discount of $7.79 to Brent for the same month on ICE. The spread closed at $8.21 on Aug. 15, the widest since June 24.

via Bloomberg

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza