Oil prices hovered below $59 a barrel Friday in Asia as signs of a weak U.S. economy led investors to mull whether this month's crude rally was justified, AP reported. Benchmark crude for June delivery was up 2 cents to $58.64 a barrel by late afternoon in Singapore in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. On Thursday, the contract climbed 60 cents to settle at $58.62. Oil recently rose above $60 a barrel on optimism that the worst of the U.S. recession was over, but dismal news this week on retail sales, unemployment and housing have traders reconsidering their outlook. «Some of the green shoots are looking like yellow weeds,» said Christoffer Moltke-Leth, head of sales trading for Saxo Capital Markets in Singapore. «That's going to spill over into equity markets and have an effect on crude.» He projected that prices would fall back toward $50 a barrel soon, which could mean lower pump prices. Investors got more evidence Thursday that global crude demand may be too weak to justify the recent run-up in prices. The Paris-based International Energy Agency cut its global oil consumption forecast for a ninth consecutive month and now expects demand to fall 3 percent in 2009, or about 2.6 million fewer barrels a day than last year.
