The United States imposed sanctions on 22 companies in Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey on Wednesday for their roles in helping sell Iranian oil, the Treasury Department said. The oil sales benefit Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force, Iran’s most powerful paramilitary organization, it said. The U.S. has designated Quds as a foreign terrorist organization. The Quds Force employs front companies outside of Iran that use offshore accounts to transfer hundreds of [Read more]

U.S. crude stocks rose while gasoline and distillate inventories fell last week, the Energy Information Administration said on Wednesday. Crude inventories rose by 7.1 million barrels to 426 million barrels in the week ended July 4, the EIA said, compared with analysts' expectations in a Reuters poll for a 2.1 million-barrel draw. Crude stocks at the Cushing, Oklahoma, delivery hub rose by 464,000 barrels, the EIA said. Refinery crude runs fell by 99,000 barrels per day, the EIA said. [Read more]

Oil markets are absorbing OPEC+ production increases without building inventories, which means they are thirsty for more oil, United Arab Emirates' Energy Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei said on Wednesday. OPEC+, which pumps about half of the world's oil, has been curtailing production for several years to support the market. But it has reversed course this year to regain market share and as U.S. President Donald Trump demanded the group pump more to help keep gasoline prices lower. OPEC+ [Read more]

(The authors are Reuters Breakingviews columnists. The opinions expressed are their own.) By Aimee Donnellan, Karen Kwok DUBLIN/LONDON, July 9 (Reuters Breakingviews) - A good tradesperson picks the right tool for the job. That’s not the approach Donald Trump is taking to his retooling of the American economy. The U.S. president floated 200% and 50% tariffs on drugs and copper respectively. But the outcome of hammering these two wildly different industries with the same blunt instrument is [Read more]

The Kremlin, asked on Wednesday about U.S. President Donald Trump's criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said that Moscow was "calm" regarding the criticism, and that it would continue to try to fix a "broken" U.S.-Russia relationship. In a call with reporters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "We are quite calm about this." "We expect to continue our dialogue with Washington and our line on repairing the rather broken bilateral relations," he added. Trump said on Tuesday [Read more]

Oil prices edged down on Wednesday after rising to two-week highs in the previous session, as investors awaited new developments on U.S. tariffs amid expectations of rising crude inventories in the United States. Brent crude futures slipped 7 cents, or 0.1%, at $70.08 a barrel by 0400 GMT. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude fell 8 cents, or 0.1%, to $68.25 a barrel. U.S. President Donald Trump's latest tariff delay provided some hope to major trade partners Japan, South Korea and the [Read more]

Russia has confiscated assets worth 3.9 trillion roubles, or around $50 billion at current exchange rates, over the past three years, underscoring the scale of the transformation into a "fortress Russia" economic model, the Kommersant newspaper said. Foreign companies have grappled with the risk of state seizure since Russia sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022, but Moscow, citing strategic stability and domestic security, has increasingly turned its attention to domestic assets [Read more]

President Donald Trump said he will announce a 50% tariff on copper on Tuesday, hoping to boost U.S. production of a metal critical to electric vehicles, military hardware, the power grid and many consumer goods. U.S. Comex copper futures jumped more than 12% to a record high after Trump announced the planned tariffs, which came earlier than the industry had expected, and the rate was steeper. Trump told reporters at a White House cabinet meeting that he planned to make the copper tariff [Read more]