Oil prices surge 9% in one day
Mounting concerns over Libya's violent crisis battered stocks once again Tuesday and sent oil prices surging, while the earthquake in the New Zealand city of Christchurch pushed the country's currency sharply lower.
With deep rifts opening up in Moammar Gadhafi's regime, air force pilots defecting and a bloody crackdown in the capital of Tripoli, investors are fretting over how the crisis will end and what the impact on the North African country's oil production will be.
Libya is the world's 18th largest oil producer, pumping out around 1.8 million barrels a day, or a little under 2 percent of global daily output. The OPEC country also sits atop the biggest oil reserves in the whole of Africa.
With so much uncertainty surrounding a large chunk of the world's daily oil production, oil prices surged. Benchmark crude for March delivery was up $7.88 a barrel, or 9.1 percent, to $94.08 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
"The Middle East will remain the market's focus today with moves in the oil price probably the best single indicator of the market's assessment of the wider implications of events there," said Adrian Foster, an analyst at Rabobank International.
With the oil price rising at such a rapid rate, stocks are inevitably under severe pressure.
Rising crude prices are a particular worry for investors as they reinforce fears of inflation and raw materials costs. They also stoke worries of a big drop in global demand levels, as experienced in previous oil price shocks in 1973-4, 1979 and 2008.
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