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Oil prices start to move up

19 January 2009 07:46 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Vahab Rzayev â€“ APA-Economics. Crude oil for February delivery fell as much as 60 cents, or 1.6 percent, to $35.91 a barrel in after-hours electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, Bloomberg reports. There will be no floor trading in New York today because of the Martin Luther King Day holiday.
The contract, which expires tomorrow, rose 3.1 percent to $36.51 on Jan. 16 as investors who had expected further declines in February crude bought oil back to limit losses ahead of todayâ€™s holiday. Oil fell 11 percent last week as U.S. stockpiles rose and OPEC forecast a decline in demand.
Brent crude oil for March settlement fell as much as 62 cents, or 1.3 percent, to $45.95 a barrel. The contract dropped 2.3 percent on Londonâ€™s ICE Futures Europe exchange on Jan. 16.
Global oil demand will shrink 0.6 percent to 85.3 million barrels a day this year, the first two-year decline since 1983, the International Energy Agency said Jan. 16. A report this week in the U.S., the worldâ€™s largest oil consumer, will probably show housing starts last month fell to the lowest annual rate since at least 1959, according to a Bloomberg News survey of economists.