By V. Phani Kumar, MarketWatch
HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — Crude-oil prices retreated Thursday in electronic trading, as investor hopes for a signal of further Federal Reserve stimulus came up empty and as fears of a sharp slowdown in Chinese economic growth also weighed on the commodity.
Light, sweet crude-oil futures for delivery in August CLQ2 -1.00% fell 69 cents, or 0.8%, to $85.12 a barrel in electronic trading.
The front-month contract had settled sharply higher on the New York Mercantile Exchange overnight, before the minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee’s last monetary-policy meeting were released.
The minutes showed that only a few officials thought more asset purchases would be necessary, pouring cold water on expectations that central-bank officials might lean toward expanding their quantitative easing in view of a weakening global economy.
The drop came ahead of China’s release of its second-quarter gross-domestic-product data on Friday, with economists surveyed by FactSet expecting growth to slow to 7.5%.
At that level, the rate of China’s expansion would be markedly lower than the 8.1% growth recorded in the first quarter, which was itself the economy’s slowest pace since the first quarter of 2009.
Also reflecting subdued investor sentiment, U.S. equity futures pointed to a lower open Thursday on Wall Street, with Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA -0.38% futures down 67 points, or 0.5%, at 12,469.
Elsewhere in the energy complex, August futures for gasoline RBQ2 -0.62% and heating oil HOQ2 -1.16% dropped 0.6% to $2.75 per gallon and 1.1% to $2.73 per gallon, respectively.
Natural-gas futures for delivery in the same month NGQ12 -0.60% shed 0.6% to $2.84 per million British thermal units.
