Global stocks have come under pressure and Brent crude oil surpassed $100 a barrel as escalating fighting across the Middle East stokes fears of energy-driven inflation. <\/p>\n
The benchmark crude contract rose to $100.19 on Wednesday, its highest level since July 24, when a memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran was in place, and its price was on the downswing. <\/p>\n
The US military attacked five Iranian crude oil carriers overnight, with Iran retaliating with missile attacks on US forces in Jordan and attacks on shipping. <\/p>\n
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington would keep hitting Iranian oil tankers in response to attempted attacks on US warships. <\/p>\n
Wall Street’s three main stock indexes \u2013 the S&P, Dow and Nasdaq \u2013 each saw small losses. European stocks dropped to one-week lows, with industrial and banking stocks hit the worst. Canada’s blue-chip stock futures also inched down. <\/p>\n
Asian markets fluctuated, although technology shares continued to climb back from a July low, driven by the artificial intelligence boom. <\/p>\n
Ipek Ozkardeskaya, a senior analyst at Swissquote, told Reuters that risk appetite remained weak due to rising oil prices from the war. <\/p>\n
“Summer was full of hope that a peace agreement could be achieved,” he said. “This optimism is fading as we enter September.” <\/p>\n
Manish Kabra, a multi-asset strategist at Societe Generale, said $100 was a “psychological threshold” rather than an economic one. <\/p>\n
“We think crude needs to hit $150 to create a major drawback in demand cycle,” he said. Rising diesel prices could feed into inflation and services, he added. <\/p>\n
The surge in oil prices has added to concerns that higher inflation will lead central banks to adopt more restrained monetary policies. <\/p>\n
The European Central Bank is expected to hike interest rates on Thursday, and next week the US Federal Reserve will meet to determine whether they will do the same. <\/p>\n
Bond markets are feeling the strain as well. Inflation concerns have raised yields in recent weeks as traders anticipate central bank tightening. <\/p>\n
Since the US and Iran resumed attacks on each other at the end of August, benchmark bonds in the US, Japan and some European countries have seen multidecade-high yields, raising concerns over government borrowing costs and the health of global financial institutions. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Global stocks have come under pressure and Brent crude oil surpassed $100 a barrel as escalating fighting across…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":285344,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[1221,77288,70290,34,261,17432],"class_list":["post-285343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iran","tag-brent-crude-oil","tag-crude-oil-carriers","tag-global-stocks","tag-iran","tag-oil-prices","tag-secretary-of-state-marco-rubio"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117241196288733297","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/285344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}