World Bank Raises Oil Price Forecast to $43

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 5:15AM EST · Published Jul 27, 4:47AM EDT

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World Bank Raises Oil Price Forecast to $43 — © Thinkstock

The price of oil is about $43, and the World Bank expects it to stay there for the rest of the year. The decision is based on both supply and concern about production interruption. Without explicitly saying so, demand in China will be a defining factor

Its comments:

The World Bank is raising its 2016 forecast for crude oil prices to $43 per barrel from $41 per barrel due to supply outages and robust demand in the second quarter.

Oil prices jumped 37 percent in the second quarter of 2016 due to disruptions to supply, particularly wildfires in Canada and sabotage of oil infrastructure in Nigeria. The revised forecast appears in the World Bank’s latest Commodities Markets Outlook and takes into account a recent softening of demand and the recovery of some disrupted supply.

“We expect slightly higher oil prices for the second half of 2016 as oil market oversupply diminishes,” said John Baffes, Senior Economist and lead author of the Commodities Markets Outlook. “However, inventories remain very large and will take some time to be drawn down.”

Despite the recovery of oil and many other commodity prices in the second quarter of 2016, most commodity indexes tracked by the World Bank are expected to decline this year. This trend is due to persistently elevated supplies, and in the case of industrial commodities – which include energy, metals, and agricultural raw materials — weak growth prospects in emerging market and developing economies. However, most of the declines are projected to be smaller than expected in the April outlook.

Based on the sharp drop in oil prices recently, the oversupply may already be gone.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.