The Brent oil price retraced solidly last night to $48.59 after its pointless short squeeze yesterday. The news was all about lousy earnings, from the WSJ:
Royal Dutch Shell PLC posted a $6.1 billion loss in the third quarter after its decision to walk away from exploring the Arctic for oil and exploiting Canada’s oil sands resulted in $7.9 billion in charges. Petro China Co., the biggest oil-and-gas producer by volume in China, said its third-quarter net profit fell by more than 80%.
Total SA, the French oil giant, said its net profit fell 69% compared with last year’s third quarter, partly the result of a $650 million write-down in its Canada oil-sands ventures. Italy’s Eni SpA experienced a loss of €952 million in the third quarter and decided to sell 12.5% of its troubled oil-field services company Saipem SpA.
And in the U.S., ConocoPhillips reported a loss of $1.1 billion and announced new plans to trim spending.
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David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
