Crude oil prices fell on Thursday, where the U.S. dollar strengthened despite the ECB’s announcement of more monetary easing, as the European Central Bank cut the benchmark interest rates by 25 basis points to 1.00% in line with forecasts and announced more nonstandard measures to ease tensions surrounding the European debt crisis. Nonetheless, the ECB stopped short from signaling quantitative easing, which weighed down on confidence ahead of the EU summit on Friday.
Moreover, pessimism started to spread through markets ahead of the EU summit, where investors are starting to doubt the ability of EU leaders to come up with a resolution to the debt crisis. Accordingly, investors targeted lower yielding assets including the U.S. dollar, which put weighed down on crude oil prices.
Traders will continue to monitor the developments from Europe regarding the debt crisis, where the focus will turn to the EU summit on Friday, and whether EU leaders will be able to craft a solution to the debt crisis in Europe.
Crude oil prices could drop further on Friday, where mounting speculations that EU leaders will fail to reach an agreement to ease the debt crisis could put more negative pressure on crude oil prices, while the prospects of slowing global growth could also put negative pressure on prices. Overall, we expect crude oil prices to fluctuate heavily on Friday.
Friday December 9:
The United States will join the session at 13:30 GMT with the Trade Balance figures for October, which could have narrowed slightly to $13.0 billion from $13.1 billion.
At 14:55 GMT theUnited Stateswill end the week with theUniversityofMichigan Confidencefigure for December in a preliminary reading, where the confidence is expected higher at 65.5 compared with the prior of 64.1.
**European Leaders Summit**
Originally posted here
