LONDON/SYDNEY (Reuters) – Caution recaptured world markets on Monday as a near 30%drubbing for U.S. WTI crude oil kicked off a busy week of data and incomes that will drive home the damage being caused by global coronavirus lockdowns.
FILE PHOTO: The German share price index DAX chart is visualized at the stock exchange in Frankfurt, Germany, April 17,2020 REUTERS/Staff/File Picture
Europe’s stock markets made a dazed start, with the pan-regional EUROSTOXX 600 tumbling back into the red as London’s FTSE FTSE, Germany’s DAX GDAXI and Paris, Milan and Madrid all fell more than 1%. [.EU]
E-Mini futures for the S&P 500 ESc1 tumbled nearly 2%too, after Wall Street had actually enjoyed a strong end to recently [.N], though even that hardly shown the carnage in oil markets.
With some worldwide storage facilities almost complete to capacity, the ‘front-month’ Might benchmark U.S. crude contract CLc1 was down $5.40, or 29.5%, to just under $13 a barrel – the lowest given that March1999
European standard Brent was down a more manageable 5%LCOc1 at $2660 a barrel, but everything pointed to the very same issue – too much supply, insufficient need.
” For oil there is a little bit of a technical story (with storage), however still, if energy consumption is down 30%and OPEC reduces supply by 10%, there is still a large gap,” stated Rabobank’s head of macro strategy, Elwin de Groot.
Equity and other major markets nevertheless were still trading relatively robustly and largely on the newsflow of the European virus numbers slowly boiling down, he included.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan.MIAPJ0000 PUS