Oil prices recovered some ground Friday, rallying above $71 a barrel on speculation that OPEC could slash output in an effort to stop crude's downward spiral. Light, sweet crude for November delivery rose $2 to settle at $71.85 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange after earlier rising as high as $74.30. On Thursday, prices lost $4.69 to settle at $69.85 a barrel. Oil is now down $75 – or 51 percent – since catapulting to a record high of $147.27 on July 11. In London, December Brent crude rose $1.76 to settle at $69.60 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange. The bearish sentiment around oil has grown more feverish in recent days, lopping more than $11 off prices in the previous three trading sessions alone. A barrel of crude hasn't been this cheap in almost 14 months. The pullback comes as a widening economic slowdown forces a wholesale contraction in US energy demand: Americans are driving less, airlines are keeping more planes on the ground and businesses are ramping down operations. Worried about the financial fallout of the oil price drop, the Organization of Petroleum Producing Countries, which controls 40 percent of the world's oil supply, called a special meeting for next Friday in Vienna, Austria to address the slide. Underscoring the OPEC's anxiety, it moved up the date of the meeting by nearly a month. Analysts said OPEC could decide to trim output by as much as 1 million barrels a day in a bid to halt the slide, in addition to a 500,000 barrel per day cut announced last month. Wall Street stocks lost ground in volatile trade Friday as investors turned cautious in the last day of a tumultuous week marked by swings of panic and optimism over the global financial crisis. The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 127.04 points (1.41 percent) to close at 8,852.22, capping a week of ups and downs that saw the blue-chip index gain 4.7 percent after a horrific 18 percent meltdown the prior week. The Nasdaq composite lost 6.42 points (0.37 percent) to 1,711.29 and the broad Standard & Poor's 500 index dropped 5.88 points (0.62 percent) to 940.55. After a strong rally Thursday, the market saw more wild swings, with the Dow index rising up to 300 points and trading as much as 260 points lower during the session. Analysts said investors were still cautious about the impact of a global credit crunch even after governments around the world agreed to pour vast amounts of cash into banks to help ease the crisis.
