By Brian Baskin Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Crude futures rose Friday as concerns about Greece's debt eased, though prices remained just below recent highs. Light, sweet crude for June delivery recently traded 68 cents, or 0.8%, higher at $85.85 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude on the ICE futures exchange traded 54 cents, or 0.6%, higher at $87.44 a barrel. Investors are returning to commodity and equity markets after Greece agreed to austerity measures as a condition of receiving financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. Fears that Greece's debt would spiral out of control, and new doubts about deficits in Portugal and Spain, had sent many markets tumbling earlier in the week. The euro strengthened against the dollar as confidence in the currency was bolstered, making oil priced in the greenback cheaper to purchase. The euro was recently at $1.3328, from $1.3223 earlier. Investors' newfound optimism was dented when the Commerce Department said Friday that U.S. first-quarter gross domestic product grew by 3.2%, just below the 3.3% consensus estimate in a Dow Jones survey. U.S. stock futures shed some gains after the release. Even after a week of dramatic price swings, oil has remained within a trading range of $81 to $86 a barrel. Market participants said another sharp drop is likely if prices don't rise above the range and hold there for more than a few hours. Front-month crude futures hit a 2010 intraday high of $87.09 a barrel on April 6. "It's momentum--we held at the lower end of the range, the buying comes back and here we are coming back to the upper end," said Tom Bentz, a broker and analyst with BNP Paribas Commodity Futures Inc. in New York. "Maybe the next day we will walk in to more worries about a default in Europe, and we're back down again." The oil market may also be responding to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which has spread to the Louisiana coastline from an offshore well that began leaking last week after the rig working it caught fire and sank. The spill is growing at a rate of up to 5,000 barrels a day, and may not be stopped for weeks. "Given the rich concentration of both offshore upstream assets and refining and petrochemical plants along the Gulf Coast, markets are increasingly concerned about the potential for restriction of vessel movements to tighten crude and product markets," wrote analysts with J.P. Morgan. So far, no disruption to oil production or shipping has been reported, however. Front-month May reformulated gasoline blendstock, or RBOB, recently traded 4 cents, or 1.7%, higher at $2.3956 a gallon. May heating oil traded 2.91 cents, or 1.3%, higher at $2.2803 a gallon. Both contracts expire at the end of trading Friday. -By Brian Baskin, Dow Jones Newswires; 212-416-2453; brian.baskin@dowjones.com.

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