Traders awoke to a hectic and fluid market on Monday morning as the Dow Jones and S&P 500 each lost .5% and .4% respectively. This comes off the heels of a weekend attack on Saudi Arabian oil facilities which sky-rocketed the price of crude oil up almost 11% to $67.03 a barrel at the time of this writing. In fact, crude prices were even higher this morning and were up almost 19.5% before teetering down to current levels. The attack on Saudi Arabia severely hampers the world’s oil production as the facilities affected reportedly produce almost 5.7 million barrels daily. To try and hedge against the imminent price inflation, President Trump authorized the release of oil, on a “need be” basis from the Petroleum Reserve. Whether or not this will help the cause, remains to be to be seen, but hopefully it can stop the bleeding.
While oil is on the front page of the news, let’s not forget the FOMC meeting on the agenda this week. The Fed is expected to discuss another .25% rate-cut as we try to fix the U.S. yield curve. There’s a lot of moving parts this week, stay tuned for updates.