Wall Street joins global market sell-off after oil surges over $100 a barrel; UK interest rate cut hopes evaporate – business live

The oil price is rising again, after G7 ministers failed to agree to release their crude reserves at their meeting today.

US crude, which had been bobbing around $100 a barrel a few minutes ago, has now risen back to $103.30 a barrel.

Brent crude, the international benchmark, is back to $104.70.

Those are gains of around 13% today – a monster move for the oil price, but still lower than the $119.50/barrel hit last night as markets reopened.

Newsflash: G7 finance ministers have not, yet, agreed to release oil stockpiles to calm the market.

Finance ministers from the G7 – that’s Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States – have held their planned conference call today to discuss the crisis.

France’s finance minister, Roland Lescure, has said that the G7 is “not there yet” on an agreement to release oil stockpiles, and has yet to reach a concensus on the issue.

Reuters reports that Lescure added that ministers have agreed to use “any necessary tools if need be” to stabilise the market, including “the potential release of necessary stockpiles”.

Japanese finance minister Satsuki Katayama has told a briefing that the International Energy Agency called for a coordinated release of emergency oil reserves during today’s online call with the G7.

Katayama said:

“IEA called for each country to do coordinated release of oil reserves.”

Reuters are reporting that a Greek-operated tanker with one million barrel of oil, which was loaded up in Saudi Arabia, has saied through the strait of Hormuz today.

Ship trackers also show that two “Iran-linked oil products tankers” have also sailed through the strait, they add.

A sign that the strait isn’t totally closed, although many tanker firms are reluctant to risk sailing through it in case they are attacked.

All but four of the 30 companies on the Dow Jones Industrial Average have dropped in early trading.

Aircraft manufacturer Boeing (-3.2%) are the top faller, followed by manufacturing conglomerate 3M (-3.1%) and network equipment maker Cisco (-3%).

Wall Street has begun the new week by dropping, as investors react to oil’s surge over $100 a barrel.

It’s not a terribly severe sell-off at all, though.

The Dow Jones industrial average has dropped by 434 points at the open, a fall of 0.91%, to 47,067 points.

The broader S&P 500 index, and the tech-focused Nasdaq are both down 0.9%.

David Morrison, senior market analyst at Trade Nation, says the jump in energy prices has triggered “a wave of negative sentiment as investors look to trim their exposure to risk assets”.

India is not planning to release oil reserves in coordination with the International Energy Agency and has no immediate plans to raise retail prices for gasoline and diesel as of now, a government source told Reuters today.

Here’s a fascinating chart from Deutsche Bank, comparing inflation this decade to the 1970s, when the global economy suffered two prices shocks, both from the Middle East.

Their market strategist Jim Reid reminds us what was going on five decades ago:

Back in the 1970s, there was a first oil shock in 1973, when an oil embargo was placed on Western countries in retaliation for their support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Oil prices nearly quadrupled but remained relatively stable afterwards. So inflation began to fall back. However, by 1978, inflation had begun to pick up from its cyclical lows again and accelerated further when political unrest in Iran intensified and strikes disrupted the oil sector.

In early 1979, the Iranian Revolution then occurred, with the monarchy overthrown and Ayatollah Khomeini becoming leader of the new Islamic Republic. At the time, Iran accounted for roughly 7% of global oil production, but the upheaval saw output collapse from around 5.5–6.0mn barrels per day to roughly 1–1.5mn, before recovering gradually to average around 3mn barrels per day in 1979.

Although the net loss to global supply was only about 4–5%, oil prices surged from roughly $15/bbl to nearly $38/bbl between 1979 and 1980, around a 150% increase. The move wasn’t solely about physical shortages, but also uncertainty, precautionary stockpiling and fears of wider geopolitical disruption—a psychological shock as much as a physical one. Then in 1980, the Iran-Iraq war began, adding even more uncertainty.

One difference this time, though, is that the 2022 inflation shock was caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, not conflict in the Middle East.

The economic situation today is also different – long-term inflation expectations are stable, economies are much less energy-intensive today, and weaker unions mean less chance of a 1970s-style wage-price spiral.

That said, the recent oil shock has been extremely rapid, Reid adds:

The last six days have seen prices rise around +44% as I write, having been up as much as +65% at the highs earlier today in Asia. By comparison, the sharpest monthly increases during the 1979 surge were April (+13%), May (+12%) and June (+22%).

The most striking similarity is the sequence of shocks, with Iran at the centre of the second shock in both decades and arriving roughly 4–5 years after the first. The key difference is the inflation regime. In the late 1970s, expectations were poorly anchored and the second oil shock helped ignite a wage-price spiral that required aggressive monetary tightening. Today by contrast, expectations remain relatively anchored and the global economy is less sensitive to energy shocks than half a century ago.

The Anglo-German travel company Tui said it has repatriated another 600 British, German and other package holidaymakers from the Middle East, flying them on its own planes to Manchester and Hanover on Sunday.

Around 300 people flew from the Maldives to Manchester while 300 were repatriated from the United Arab Emirates (with a stop in Heraklion in Crete) to Manchester and Hanover.

This comes after the tour operator repatriated 550 holidaymakers last week to Frankfurt and Hanover, on aircraft it chartered from the airline Emirates.

Tui also started flying back people who are on board its cruise ship Mein Schiff 5, anchored in Doha, last night.

The Europea Commission has said that member states have sufficient stocks of oil and gas despite the disrupted supply chains due to the war in the Middle East.

EC spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen told reporters in Brussels:

“We are far less concerned about the security of supply than we are of the high energy prices.”

Itkonen added that EU members had stocks of oil or equivalents to last up to 90 days, and that there was no sign of any emergency situation.

Mortgage lenders are repricing their products, higher, due to the turmoil in the markets since the Iranian war began.

PA Media reports that mortgage borrowers looking for a new deal will have some “unwelcome news”, a website has warned, as it saw a flurry of lenders reveal hikes to their rates, pushing up average fixed rates for homeowners to choose from.

Financial information website Moneyfacts said that it had seen several lenders adjust pricing on their fixed deals, including First Direct, Coventry Building Society, Yorkshire Building Society and Nottingham Building Society.

Cumberland Building Society was also withdrawing products while it repriced its mortgages, Moneyfacts said.

The hikes came on top of increases made last week, with HSBC UK, NatWest and Nationwide Building Society having made changes.