Weekly News Summary For February 22-28, 2019

Friday, Feb 22: Trade Talk Hopes Lift Brent to Fresh 2019 High

Oil prices gained ground on Friday, with Brent hitting a fresh 2019 high on OPEC’s ongoing output reductions and hopes that the US and China could soon end their trade conflict.

Brent crude futures climbed $67.60 per barrel to mark a new high for this year, while US WTI crude futures rose to $57.48 a barrel, hovering near the week’s $57.55 per barrel 2019 high.

Monday, Feb 25: Global Stocks Rally on Tariff Delay

Stock markets rallied on Monday after US President Donald Trump decided to put the tariff increase set for March 1 on hold.

The Shanghai Composite rose 5.6%,its highest one-day percentage gain since June 2015, to reach an eight-month high, while other stocks such as the Nikkei added about half a percent to hit its highest since mid-December and the pan-European STOXX 600 climbed to its highest level since October 10.

Tuesday, Feb 26: SEC Asks for Contempt Order against Tesla CEO Musk

Shares of Tesla dropped by 5% on Tuesday after the SEC requested to hold CEO Elon Musk in contempt after the head of the US carmaker allegedly violated a fraud settlement by publishing material information without preapproval.

The SEC noted that Musk’s Feb. 19 tweet which stated, “Tesla made 0 cars in 2011, but will make around 500k in 2019,”did not receive company approval before it was posted, which was inaccurate and shared to over 24 million people.

Wednesday, Feb 27: Huawei, Samsung Settle Two-year Old Patent Fight

Huawei Technologies and Samsung Electronics have agreed to put their two-year old patent dispute, on hold in the US as the two makers of Android smartphones established a settlement deal on February 25.

A joint motion stated that the parties entered into a settlement agreement and, pursuant to that, they expect in the next several weeks to complete the pending steps to finalize the settlement and eventually that Huawei will file an unopposed motion to dismiss this pending appeal within the next 30 days.

Thursday, Feb 28: US Crude Output Registers Record 12.1 million bpd

US crude oil output posted another peak for the second straight week, as EIA data showed production rose 100,000 bpd last week to a record 12.1 million bpd.

EIA report also stated that US net imports and commercial crude imports fell to their lowest at 2.6 million bpd and 5.9 million bpd respectively, while inventories at the Cushing Oklahoma hub grew 46.7 million barrels last week to their highest since December 2017.