Goldman Sachs has maintained its oil price forecast for Brent crude, seeing the benchmark averaging $64 over the fourth quarter of the year despite recent developments that have pushed both Brent and West Texas Intermediate higher.
“Increasing pressure on Russia and Iran sanctioned oil supply poses an upside risk to our price forecast, especially given the faster-than-expected normalization in spare capacity,” Goldman analysts said in acknowledgment of these developments, as quoted by Reuters.
President Trump last week threatened importers of Russian oil with 100% additional tariffs unless Russia agreed to a ceasefire with Ukraine. Russia’s biggest oil buyers—China and India—have indicated they have no intention of suspending purchases, which should be theoretically bearish for oil prices.
These secondary tariffs—and other import levies—would affect the prospects of oil demand growth, the investment bank noted in its forecast. It estimated the effect of U.S. tariffs on oil demand at 800,000 barrels daily between this year and next. They also cited weaker-than-assumed economic activity data for the United States as a factor in that demand estimate.
“The U.S. economy is now growing at a below-potential pace”, the bank’s analysts said, seeing a higher risk of a recession over the next 12 months than in their last forecast.
As regards OPEC+ production policy, the analysts said that “While OPEC+ policy remains flexible, we assume OPEC+ will keep its production quota unchanged after September as we expect the pace of builds in OECD commercial stocks to accelerate and seasonal demand tailwinds to fade away.”
OPEC+ agreed this weekend to add another 547,000 barrels daily to its oil production next month. This follows a similar increase for August and is part of a broader effort to restore about 2.5 million bpd of supply—approximately 2.4% of global demand—by September.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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