On July 1, international oil prices rose sharply, with the settlement price of the main contract in the US WTI crude oil futures market at US $75.23/barrel, up US $1.76 or 2.40%. Brent crude oil futures market settlement price of the main contract at 75.84 U.S. dollars / barrel, or 1.22 U.S. dollars or 1.63%. WTI broke through $76 in the session, reaching a new high since October 2018. At the macro level, is the economic data good for support? U.S. stocks rose sharply and the expectation of economic recovery boosted oil prices. In addition, OPEC members had different opinions, and the meeting was postponed to Friday. In the second half of the year, OPEC’s supply tone was still inclined to high oil prices, which made the market warm up.

On Thursday local time, the latest data released by the U.S. Department of labor showed that 364000 people applied for unemployment benefits for the first time in the week ending June 26, a decrease of 51000 compared with the previous week, and far lower than the 390000 expected by the market. In addition, PMI data was also eye-catching, with the final PMI value of 62.1 in the United States in May, reaching a new high for the second consecutive month. The favorable economic data boosted US stocks to a new high, and the premium of risky assets represented by crude oil was also greatly pushed up.

In addition to the positive expectation of economic recovery, the ambiguous internal supply policy of OPEC + on the supply side has also brought upward momentum to oil prices. The OPEC + internal meeting, which should have been held on Thursday, is quite important and may be related to the main tone of OPEC + supply policy in the second half of the year.

On Thursday, news came from the market that there was disagreement between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which forced the OPEC + meeting to be postponed to Friday. The specific point of divergence is a proposal agreed by Saudi Arabia and Russia. According to the proposal, oil production will increase by another 400000 barrels a day from August to December, and the total daily production will increase by 2 million barrels. The proposal is relatively conservative, and lower than the previous market expectation of 500000 barrels of supply, the market is more bullish atmosphere.

Recently, the international oil market has seen a lot of good news. Crude oil analysts from business news believe that oil prices may continue to hover at a high level in the short term. On the one hand, it is driven by the expectation of economic recovery. On the other hand, it is expected that OPEC’s main tone of relaxing production reduction in the second half of the year may still be relatively conservative, because Saudi Arabia and Russia have high expectations of high oil prices. Many institutions also generally predict that the oil price may exceed $80 in the second half of the year. In short, the oil price may fluctuate from high to high in the short term, but in the medium and long term, the oil price still has action power.