Commodities: Libya to restart oil exports from Hariga

Reports from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on Monday telling clients that oil disruptions had seen the oft-cited excess of oil production in global markets vanish led to a pick-up in buying in crude futures.

Front month Brent crude futures were 2.31% higher as of 20:17 BST, alongside a gain of 3.23% for West Texas Intermediate.

Just in the past two weeks various supply disruption including the wildfires raging in Canada had taken between 1.5m and 2.0m barrels of output offline, Goldman estimated.

Nonetheless, elevated levels of stockpiles globally were acting as a buffer, both brokers pointed out, with Goldman Sachs expecting the market to return to a situation of excess supply at the start of 2017.

On a more 'bearish' note for the price of oil, the two competing administrations of Libya's state oil company, National Oil Corp., agreed on Monday to restart exports from the port of Hariga in a move to maintain the country's energy exports and avoid permanent damage to the pipelines which feed the storage tanks at the export terminal, Bloomberg reported.

Those two segments of the market also found a bid on Monday, albeit more mixed in the case of the latter.

Three-month copper futures gained 0.7% to closed at $4,651 per metric tonne in LME trading, with similarly-dated tin and zinc contracts advancing 0.5% and 0.8%.

Corn futures on Eurnext LIFFE were also wanted, rising by 1.8% to €168.75 per metric tonne.

White sugar futures tacked on 0.6% to $481 per metric tonne, while those for cocoa tumbled 1.6% to £2,156.0 per tonne.

Economic data out from China over the weekend was uniformly weak although not all analysts were despondent.

"Looking ahead, we still expect the data out of China to get better, not worse, during the next couple of quarters. [...] But with the impact of earlier policy loosening yet to be fully felt, we think there is enough stimulus already in the pipeline to support a recovery until the end of the year."

As of 20:32 BST Bloomberg's commodity index was up by 0.80% to 85.14 as the US dollar spot index slipped 0.07% to 94.55.