American oil sinks 40% and price is lowest since 1998

The price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate oil, the benchmark for the United States, fell below the $ 11 barrier on Monday in the case of the futures contracts in May, which expire on Tuesday, sinking the price of American crude oil at minimums since 1998, fearing that the ‘evaporation’ of demand will force some saturated farms to stop due to not being able to store more production.

Specifically, the price of a barrel of WTI oil for May marked an intraday minimum price of $ 10.96, 40% lower than the $ 18.27 at the end of last week and its lowest price since 1998.

For its part, according to CME Group data, the price of June WTI oil futures, which expire on May 19, fell more than 13%, below $ 22 a barrel, while in the case of contracts for July, the drop was more than 8%, standing at less than $ 27 per unit.

In the case of reference oil in the Old Continent, the price of Brent stood at an intraday low of $ 26, 7.4% lower than last Friday’s close. So far this year, Brent’s barrel has fallen 61%.

Last week, the International Energy Agency (IEA) described 2020 as “the worst year in history for oil” and referred to this month as “black April”, also warning that excess supply would put It tests the world’s capacity to store crude oil, with the risk that saturation in some fields forces production to stop.

Likewise, last Friday China confirmed the worst fears by announcing that its gross domestic product (GDP) registered a contraction of 6.8% in the first quarter of 2020 in year-on-year terms as a result of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, which It represents the first drop in the activity of the Asian giant in the entire historical series, which dates back to 1992, although the last drop in GDP recognized by the Chinese authorities dates from 1976.

In quarterly data, the Chinese economy registered a contraction of 9.8% between January and March 2020, after growing 1.5% in the fourth quarter of 2019, 1.3% in the third quarter of the year Last, 1.5% in the second and 1.6% in the first quarter of 2019, according to the Chinese statistical office.