Lockdowns, EIA Forecasts, Fed and Retail Sales Ahead

16 de dez. de 2020

News about vaccines gives positive sentiments, but they are clearly ahead of current reality. Here and now the list of knockdowns is expanding. Following Germany (the fourth economy in the world) and California (the fifth economy in the world), London is introducing a hard lockdown this week, next in line are New York, Italy and the Netherlands.

Against this backdrop, it was logical that OPEC and EIA downgraded forecasts for oil demand growth rates. In particular, the EIA lowered its own demand forecast for 2021 by 170 thousand bpd. At the same time, the Agency noted that oil production increased in November and will continue to grow in December, because from January 1, OPEC + will increase oil production by 0.5 million bbl / d. Countries that are not members of OPEC + will continue to increase production.

But the markets continue to ignore this, as well as the fact that according to API data, US oil stocks have been growing for the fifth week in a row. As a result, the price for oil increased yesterday. The reason is, in general, the same - expectations of a fast economic recovery amid victory over the pandemic (there is neither the first nor the second, and will not be in the foreseeable future).

Yesterday was an interesting topic for US stimulus. U.S. congressional leaders reported substantial progress on Tuesday after two meetings of top Democrats and Republicans.

Today promises to be extremely busy day both in terms of macroeconomic statistics and other news including FOMC meeting results. The top news in the field of statistics will be data on retail sales in the United States. Considering that the data are for November, rather weak figures can be expected. As for the Fed, the updated forecasts for the US economy from the Central Bank are of the greatest interest, since the parameters of monetary policy are likely to remain unchanged.