Crude was mixed in Asia today as traders were expecting additional stimulus to be announced during the two-day Federal Reserve meeting which starts today as well as at the ECB meet on Thursday, analysts said.

New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in September, added six cents to $89.84 a barrel and Brent North Sea crude for September delivery shed 29 cents to $105.91.

But markets were tempering their optimism with “worries that expected stimulus from the United States and Europe may fail to lift their economies”, Phillip Futures stated in a commentary.

In Europe in particular, expectations that the ECB would resume its bond purchase programme was met with a tinge of caution, IG Markets said in a report.

“While there was an air of optimism about the willingness of European policymakers to act to stabilise the bond markets, on the ground there is still an underlying sense of unease,” it stated.

Data issued by the ECB on Monday suggested that the bank had last week opted not to resume its programme of buying up bonds of Euro Zone nations, its 20th week in a row of not doing so.

The ECB launched its bond-buying blitz under the Securities Market Programme (SMP) in 2010 to help debt-wracked Euro Zone countries that were finding it difficult to drum up financing in capital markets.

But the SMP has lain dormant since February following the ECB’s moves to pump more than €one trillion ($1.23 trillion) into the banking system via three-year funding operations in December and February.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW