Perhaps it’s fitting that on the first business day of the new year, the price of oil hit a new milestone:
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Oil prices kicked off the first trading day of 2008 by hitting a new high of $100 a barrel Wednesday on violence in oil-rich Nigeria, the prospect of more interest rate cuts, a halt in Mexican imports and the expectation of yet another drop in U.S. crude supplies.
U.S. crude for February delivery jumped $4.02 to $100 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The previous trading record was $99.29 set Nov. 20. Oil prices ended 2007 by gaining nearly 60 percent for the year, the largest jump this decade.
“This market is really gonna fly,” Ira Eckstein, president of Area International Trading Corp, said from the NYMEX floor.
Normally, one would expect a market like this to fall at some point. And this probably will happen with oil. Someday. But I don’t expect to happen when the regions of the world where the oil also happen to be the most volatile on the planet.
