Oil drops to $76 as Greece crisis gnaws at confidence

BANGKOK (AP) – Oil fell to near $76 a barrel yesterday in Asia as fears intensified that Greece may not be able to crawl out from beneath a mountain of debt without defaulting.

Benchmark crude for November delivery was down $1.54 to $76.08 per barrel at late afternoon Bangkok time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange – its lowest since late September 2010. Benchmark crude fell $1.59, or two percent, to close at $77.61 per barrel in New York on Monday.

In London, Brent crude fell $1.05 to $100.64 on the ICE Futures Exchange.

Investor concerns about Greece were heightened when the debt-strapped country said over the weekend it will miss its lower budget deficit targets even after severe cost-cutting. Despite the shortcoming, Europe pledged to loan Greece money to help pay its upcoming bills, but that failed to reassure stock and commodity markets.

Without more financial aid, Greece said it will start running out of money in two weeks. A Greek default could spread to nearby countries and possibly trigger widespread banking problems. That would hamper world energy demand as lending slows and businesses cut spending.

“We have been mired in Greece since the second or third week of July and it has been a topic of conversation in every week or every other week since then,” analysts at Cameron Hanover said in a report.

“Germany’s parliament last week ratified an aid package agreed upon in July, but prices weakened as the week wore on as investors realized that last week’s vote was just the beginning.”

Oil fell along with broad declines on global stock markets. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq composite were each down about 2 percent. In Asia, benchmarks in Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea were also sharply down.

Meanwhile, manufacturing surveys out of China pointed to muted activity in September as prices for raw materials rose. One survey suggested manufacturing was stagnant, while another showed slight improvement. Both were disappointments for oil analysts and traders, since China is the second largest oil consumer in the world behind the US

“The deterioration in global manufacturing ... supports our view that underlying demand for commodities is weakening,” researchers at Capital Economics said. “We expect the prices of oil and industrial metals in particular to fall a lot further.”

In other Nymex trading Tuesday, heating oil fell 1.5 cents to $2.74 per gallon. Gasoline futures fell 1.2 cents to $2.50 a gallon. Natural gas was down 0.4 cent at $3.61 per 1,000 cubic feet.