Regional News

  Bloomberg Israel’s annual consumer price index rose in January for the first time since 2014, finally turning positive after two years of record low interest rates. The index rose 0.1 percent in January from a year earlier, having declined on an annual basis for 28 months, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics said in a statement on Wednesday. Economists in ...

  Bloomberg The government of Oman is considering financing structures that let it get advance payments from oil traders, reducing the government’s need to borrow more money from banks, sources familiar with the matter said. Under the proposed structures, Oman’s national oil company might get paid as much as two years before oil was delivered, in exchange for price discounts ...

  Bloomberg President Donald Trump has overturned an Obama-era anti-corruption rule that would have forced oil, gas and mining companies to disclose payments to foreign governments, becoming the first president in 16 years to take advantage of a law that allows him to rescind a predecessor’s regulations. Trump signed a congressional resolution to repeal a Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure ...

  Bloomberg Eni SpA will start producing from the giant Zohr natural gas field off Egypt’s Mediterranean coast by the end of 2017 and plans to invest $10 billion in the North African country over the next five years, Chief Executive Officer Claudio Descalzi said. Production plans for Zohr are on schedule, and Egypt will be Eni’s top country for ...

  Bloomberg OPEC may be getting all the credit for reviving the oil market, but it had a little help. While the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries did spur a 28 percent recovery late last year by announcing production cuts, supply isn’t the only factor buoying the market: demand repeatedly beat expectations in 2016, and is set to surprise again. ...

  Bloomberg A crippled spillway is threatening to submerge an entire region of northern California after a recent deluge of rain. And the state’s power market may already be feeling it. As state officials rush to repair an emergency spillway for the Oroville dam — just 150 miles (241 kilometers) north of San Francisco — an 819-megawatt hydropower plant, capable ...

  Bloomberg Williams Cos. is following through on a promise to unload assets and double down in a region of the U.S. where natural gas production is still booming: the Marcellus shale formation. On Thursday, the master-limited pipeline partnership controlled by Williams Cos. said it had struck a deal with Western Gas Partners LP to exchange its 50 percent stake ...

  Reuters Russian crude imports to China have risen in early 2017 as the country’s independent, or teapot, refiners have expanded their diet to include the Urals grade, trade sources said on Tuesday. Russia could expand its market share in China, the second-largest oil consumer, this year after a drop in Brent prices relative to Middle East crude benchmark Dubai ...

  Bloomberg There are limits to investors’ love affair with OPEC. After unprecedented optimism that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will manage to ease a global supply glut, money managers reduced their bets on rising West Texas Intermediate prices for the first time in a month. While the group and other major exporters are pumping less crude, US inventories ...

  Bloomberg Egyptian Finance Minister Amr El-Garhy said he expects surging inflation to peak by the end of the first quarter as the price shocks following an increase in fuel prices and the pound’s flotation fade. El-Garhy said policy makers expected prices to jump after currency controls were abandoned in November to help Egypt clinch a $12 billion International Monetary ...