Oil tempers and raises questions about Chinese demand. Oil prices were moving lower on Tuesday after hitting new highs the day before. The decline in Chinese crude imports weighs more than the difficulties encountered in the Iranian nuclear negotiations. According to Chinese customs data, oil imports increased in yuan invested but the volume of imported crude indeed fell sharply in millions barrels, according to calculations by the Bloomberg agency. According to ING's Warren Patterson and Wenyu Yao, this suggests that Chinese refiners are reluctant to import at current prices and prefer to reduce inventories instead.

Around 09:45 GMT (11:45 a.m. in Paris), a barrel of Brent from the North Sea for delivery in August was worth 71.13 dollars in London, down 0.50% from Monday's close. In New York, the barrel of WTI for the month of July lost 0.45% to 68.92 dollars. The previous day in Asian trading, WTI hit $70.00 a barrel for the first time since October 2018, when Brent peaked at $72.27, the highest since May 2019.

In addition, after a year of demand weighed down by the confinements caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the hope of a normal summer in the United States is supporting prices, since drivers in the country which consumes the most oil in the world can move freely.