Oil drops to $115
How low will it go before the election?
How high will it go after the election?
Who believes this strong dollar crap?
8-9-2008
Oil sinks on stronger dollar to $115 a barrel
NEW YORK - Oil prices dove to $115 a barrel on Friday, driven lower by a huge jump in the U.S. dollar, signs of moderating demand around the world and the burgeoning belief that commodities may have peaked.
Shrugging off concerns about a sabotaged oil pipeline in Turkey, investors pulled their money out of commodities and put it back into stocks ? giving crude oil a weekly loss of nearly $10 a barrel, and driving the Dow Jones industrial average up more than 300 points.
With energy losing its luster in the marketplace, the cost of roadside gasoline has been crawling lower.
"We're probably going to see gasoline at the retail level around $3.50 for Labor Day," said James Cordier, president of Tampa, Fla.-based trading firms Liberty Trading Group and OptionSellers.com.
"You have to remember that this market has baffled anyone who's used fundamentals or charts. But if you're a chartist, today is the death knell for the possibility of new highs in the marketplace," said Tom Kloza, publisher and chief oil analyst of the Oil Price Information Service in Wall, N.J.
Lehman Brothers chief energy economist Edward Morse issued a research note Friday saying that, barring a physical disruption to supplies, "we think oil prices have peaked."
Behavioral changes have had a dampening effect too ? Morse noted that U.S. drivers are switching to more fuel-efficient cars
Earlier this year, Americans were paying about $1.65 billion a day for gasoline at the peak of prices and demand, Kloza said. The country appears to be headed for below $1.5 billion a day now that prices are coming down and demand is slowing, he said, but he pointed out that that's still three times what Americans were paying in 2002.