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  • Oil & Economy

    Posted on November 7th, 2008 cwmoore No comments

    Quote:

    Light, sweet crude for December delivery rose 27 cents to settle at $61.04 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. But the contract dropped below $60 in overnight electronic trading for the first time 19 months.

    The U.S. Labor Department said Friday that the country’s unemployment rate hit 6.5 percent in October as another 240,000 jobs were cut, matching the worst jobless rate since March 1994. So far this year, a staggering 1.2 million jobs in the U.S. have disappeared.

    The job losses are yet another sign that the country is in a recession and that consumers and businesses will cut back on energy use.

    Most industry experts, however, believe that the decline in crude prices will not last.

    The International Energy Agency on Friday nearly doubled its forecast for the price of oil over the next 20 years, citing rising demand in the developing world as well as surging costs of production.

    According to a summary of its World Energy Outlook, the IEA hiked its forecast for the price of a barrel of oil in 2030 to just over $200 in nominal terms, compared with its forecast last year of $108 a barrel. Measured in constant dollars, the IEA forecasts oil at $120 a barrel in 2030, up from last year’s forecast of $62.

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