April 6 (Bloomberg) -- Qatar, holder of the world’s third- largest natural-gas reserves, said crude oil prices are being pushed up by speculators rather than by any shortage of supply.
“There are many investors who don’t have trust in investing in stocks or bonds or real estate, so they go to commodities,” Oil Minister Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah told reporters today at the inauguration of a new refinery in Qatar. “There is no shortage of supplies.”
Oil jumped to $86.62 a barrel yesterday, the highest settlement price since Oct. 8, 2008, as growth in U.S. jobs and service industries signaled the economy is recovering from the worst recession since the 1930s. Crude prices have advanced 70 percent in the past 12 months in New York.
Qatar is a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which supplies about 40 percent of the world’s crude. The producer group decided to leave output quotas unchanged for a fifth time at its meeting last month in Vienna.
OPEC, which isn’t scheduled to meet again before October, would increase production if there was a shortage of oil, al- Attiyah said today.
--Editors: Amanda Jordan, Rob Verdonck
To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Tuttle in Doha at rtuttle@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Voss at sev@bloomberg.net
No comments:
Post a Comment