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By the Oil Risk Management Team at A/S Global Risk Management

The highly hyped U.S. employment data on Friday came out below expectations, stalling hopes of a September interest rate hike by the Fed. 151,000 new jobs were created last month, where 180,000 were expected; unemployment rate remained at 4.9%.

Also Friday, the weekly oil rig count from Baker Hughes showed that the number of active drilling rigs increased by 1 last week to 407 (662 a year ago) and is now up 76 since beginning of July.

Over the weekend, Iran repeated its intention of raising oil output from currently around 3.8 mio. barrels per day to 4 mio. in the short term and to 4.3 mio. over the next 6 months "based on market requirement".

Other large oil producers, Russia and Saudi Arabia, stated their good intentions to contribute to an output freeze at the coming OPEC/non-OPEC meeting in Algeria later this month. Or in other words, according to Russia's president: "it would be correct to find some sort of compromise." Likely, comments like these will take headlines in the coming weeks as markets will increase focus on the potential output freeze agreement.

This morning, Chinese Caixin Services PMI came out better than expected; 52.1% (51.9% expected). Later today, UK and Euro zone Services PMIs will be published; note that today is a U.S. holiday (Labor Day).

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A/S Global Risk Management is a provider of customised hedging solutions for the management of price risk on fuel expenses. The company has offices in Denmark and Singapore. For further details about its risk management products and services, please call +45 88 38 00 00 or email hedging@global-riskmanagement.com.