INTERNATIONAL NEWS - Oil prices have a long history of violent swings.
But even by those standards, crude just experienced an incredibly extreme move.
Just a week ago oil plummeted below $38 a barrel for the first time since 2009 with little end to the pain in sight.
Flash forward to today and oil is racing back to nearly $50 a barrel. That amounts to a 30% spike in the span of merely a week. Over the past three days alone crude enjoyed its largest percentage gain since August 1990, according to The Wall Street Journal.
So what changed so dramatically? Fundamentally, not all that much. It still looks like the world has too much oil, thanks to the gush in production created by the American shale oil boom.
Concerns about a supply glut may have been eased a bit on Monday with a new government report that downgraded its estimate for U.S. oil output so far this year.
