Oil nears $60 a barrel

NEW YORK — There is a point at which high oil prices will stifle demand for fuel and cause the economy to contract, though it may not be imminent even as crude futures soar to new heights near $60 a barrel.

That's not to say the run-up in oil prices, which settled at a new record on Monday, is just getting started. Many believe the opposite to be true. But without seeing a significant drop-off in consumption or swelling of supplies, they are reluctant to predict that the energy-market rally is about to fizzle.

"I'm expecting that we're in the last leg of this uptrend, but I can't say how high the last leg of that uptrend takes us," said Tom Bentz, a broker at BNP Paribas Commodity Futures in New York. "I could also have miscalculated, and we could be in the early stages of this bull market."

Light sweet crude for July delivery climbed 90 cents Monday to $59.37 a barrel, the highest-ever close on the New York Mercantile Exchange, where oil futures have been traded since 1983.

The latest surge came as the president of OPEC said the group will consider raising its output ceiling by half a million barrels as early as Friday in an effort to cool prices. Traders said such a move would not have the desired effect.

Last week, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries raised its output target by that amount, but the market brushed the news aside, sending prices higher on concerns about a tight supply cushion, limited refining capacity and rising demand for gasoline and diesel.

Gasoline prices in the United States average $2.16 a gallon, an increase of 44 percent over the past two years, but government data released last week showed that demand is up almost 3 percent from a year ago over the past four weeks at nearly 9.5 million barrels a day — a growth rate that surprised many analysts. "The economy has accepted $50 oil. We accepted $2 gasoline, too," said oil tycoon Boone Pickens, who runs a billion-dollar hedge fund that invests in energy commodities and equities and profits when prices go up.

"I think within a year from now, you're probably looking at $3 gasoline, and you're probably looking at something over $60 for oil."

While soaring jet fuel costs have been a major problem for the airline industry, higher energy prices have not taken as much of a toll on the broader economy as many analysts had previously feared. In the first three months of the year, the U.S. economy grew at a 3.5 percent annual rate, according to the Commerce Department, slightly slower than the 4.5 percent pace a year earlier.