The price of oil has risen above $100 a barrel for the first time since July as the escalating conflict in the Middle East threatens further disruption to global supplies.
Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil prices, rose 2.7% to about $100.6 after tensions increased in the Gulf amid the latest tit-for-tat exchange of fire between the US and Iran.
UK and mainland Europe gas prices also soared on Wednesday. The benchmark Dutch gas contract rose by almost 4% to €78.73 a megawatt hour, the highest since January 2023. Meanwhile, the British contract rose by 7.77p to 196.57p a therm, the highest since December 2022.
I’m also annoyed by this sort of bait. My local newspaper was even worse, they just reported that the Brent price reached 100 USD, without information on how much it rose, or any historical comparison. So goddamn annoying.
For everyone’s reference here’s what the one year price history looks like (Beware: chart floor not fixed at Y=0):
Source
This is the price of the front-month Brent crude futures on the Intercontinental Exchange, which is apparently what people mean when they talk about the price of Oil.
Brent, Murban, and WTI are the 3 main oil indicies. Usually they track eachother closely, but that has shifted thanks to this war
Murban contains most of the middle-eastern crude that is directly affected by this conflict, and their price has drifted up beyond the other two
Here is a spirce to see all 3 major indicies: https://oilprice.com/
Thank for the info, I have heard of WTI but not of Murban.
All the papers I read always talk about Brent. They sometimes even call it a North Sea variant, so I assumed the price was only influenced by indirect coupling.
I don’t know, and can’t defend, why it’s always Brent, that was just my observation.
Appreciate the link!
Local newspapers all became garbage a long time ago sadly. We have almost nothing standing. You should see my area. The front page is down to like 6 pages, but only 2 pages of actual news.