Oil prices continued to rise on Thursday morning, reaching a nine-month high on a U.S. crude inventory draw and a weak dollar, while the price of bitcoin jumped to a record high of above $23,000, just a day after hitting the $20,000 mark.
The price of the most popular cryptocurrency surged to over $23,000 on Thursday morning, tripling so far this year.
“These are extraordinary gains in such a short period of time and bitcoin has a history of doing well amidst the hype. Can USD30,000 be on the cards by Christmas? Why not,” Craig Erlam, Senior Market Analyst - UK & EMEA at OANDA, wrote in a market commentary on Thursday.
Bitcoin’s Thursday rally above $23,000 was also fueled by “a new ‘whale’, Ruffer Investment, announcing a $744 million investment in bitcoin and after Guggenheim Partners CIO Scott Minerd claimed that bitcoin should be worth $400,000, based on its scarcity and relative value to gold as a percentage of GDP,” John Hardy, Head of FX Strategy at Saxo Bank, said.
Oil prices, for their part, were boosted early on Thursday by Wednesday’s EIA report showing a crude oil inventory decline of 3.1 million barrels for the week to December 11. The report came out a day after the American Petroleum Institute estimated inventory builds across crude and fuels, pressuring prices just as they had started to improve again.
As of 11:19 a.m. ET on Thursday, the WTI Crude price was up 0.69 percent at $48.17, and Brent Crude was trading up 0.67 percent at $51.36. A weak dollar and hopes of a U.S. stimulus package supported the prices, as did a more optimistic assessment of the economy from the Fed.
“We can kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said on a news conference on Wednesday.
“We’re thinking that this could be another long expansion,” Powell added.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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