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Oil price, inflation in focus

Iraq will be foremost in investors’ minds this coming week as oil price risk has returned to markets, complicating the task for central banks whose policies are beginning to diverge for the first time since the global financial crisis.

Oil prices neared nine-month highs late last week, touching $115 a barrel, and the rapid advance of militants in Iraq, the second-largest Opec producer, is destabilising oil markets. That has implications for inflation in the United States and Europe, as well as Asia’s export-oriented economies that are large net importers of oil.

Investors will be watching a range of data, from German and Japanese consumer prices to first-quarter US GDP, to see how the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan respond.

“Just as oil prices had become increasingly stable, we reckon the risk for an oil price spike is now the highest since the global crisis,” said Christian Keller, an economist at Barclays.

“We think a further price spike of 10 to 15 per cent from here is not implausible,” he said.

Until now, falling energy prices have partly been responsible for the eurozone’s low level of consumer price inflation, which the ECB considers to be in its “danger zone”.

A rise in the inflation rate would be welcome but economists and the International Monetary Fund believe the ECB still needs to consider US-style money printing to support the bloc.