Commerzbank notes....
Brent has now shed most of the gains it had made on Wednesday evening again and is trading at just shy of $54 per barrel this morning.
WTI fell to a somewhat lesser extent yesterday and is currently trading at $43.5 per barrel. This could have something to do with the upcoming contract rollover, which is likely to ensure that the WTI price at least appears to rise sharply on Monday.
This is because the April contract which expires today is priced almost $2 lower than the May contract which will serve as the new reference from Monday.
Apart from this technical aspect, there are still more reasons to suggest further falling oil prices. Week after week, stocks in the US are soaring to new record levels, and more supply is also reaching the market again from Iraq.
According to loading data and Reuters, oil exports from the south of Iraq totalled 2.66 million barrels per day in the first 18 days of the current month and as such are only slightly below the record level achieved in December.
Bad weather in February meant that exports amounted to only 2.29 million barrels per day. In addition, exports from the north of Iraq are rising: they totalled 290,000 barrels per day in the first ten days of March.
As from last Monday, oil exports from northern Iraq had risen to 400,000 barrels per day following the completion of repair work on a pipeline. The Iraqi oil minister recently said that he was confident that Iraq's total oil exports could exceed the 3 million barrel per day mark for the first time this month.
