Market News

BY Julia Fanzeres

(Bloomberg) -- Oil posted its first weekly decline this year after President Donald Trump threatened trade wars and demanded OPEC+ lower crude prices.

West Texas Intermediate settled little changed above $74 a barrel after fluctuating between gains and losses for most of the session. Earlier on Friday, crude extended losses after Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated he’s open to discussing Ukraine and oil prices with Trump. This week, Trump had threatened more penalties on Moscow if Putin doesn’t “make a deal” to end the prolonged war in Ukraine.

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Recently imposed US sanctions on Russia’s oil have been tightening the global market, and loosening them may increase supplies available to customers in Asia that had been scrambling to seek alternatives. The sanctions were introduced before Trump took office to boost Ukraine’s leverage in possible peace negotiations.

Oil markets have been reacting to Trump’s statements since he took office on Monday. The first week of his new term began with tariff threats aimed at Canada, Mexico and China, followed by a pledge that he would ask the OPEC+ producer group to “bring down the cost of oil.”

“He just wants the price lower,” Nadia Martin Wiggen, a director at Svelland Capital, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “He wants gasoline prices lower for the consumer, and he wants oil prices just to be lower, at least than what the Biden administration had. On the flip side, he wants producers to keep producing and especially American ones, and that’s where we see him in a tough situation.”

Futures in New York fell 4.1% this week, but remain higher for the year amid cold weather in the Northern Hemisphere and the Russia sanctions. Some of the strength in crude and freight markets that followed the sanctions has since cooled.

One of Trump’s executive orders this week was to declare a national energy emergency to help boost domestic production. In his first term, the president repeatedly called on OPEC+ to lower prices when he felt they were too high. He also pledged to refill US oil reserves “right to the top.”