Despite grim forecasts, crude oil pushed higher overnight as sentiment was given a boost by the rescue of SVB Financial announced by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). A leveling down U.S. Dollar (The DXY Dollar Index Spot is trading as of March 28 premarket at around 102.55, down 0.29% over the last 24 hours) and supply concerns also appear to have provided some impetus for the uplift.

West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for deliveries in May advanced by 5.20% shortly before the EU markets open to sell for $73.14. In its turn, Brent for the same month's settlements increased by 4.25% to $77.81 per barrel.

While some media outlets have attributed the rise in oil prices to Iraq's move to shut down the Iraqi Kurdistan-Turkey pipeline following the international arbitration ruling, there may not be enough barrel volumes here to push prices up that much. There has been speculation that a 400,000 bpd tap shut from the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (KRG) could offset market expectations for a 500,000 bpd loss in Russian oil, which emerged as part of yet-to-be-delivered production cut promise.

The important news in this context is that the judicial ruling decided in favor of Iraq that Ankara had broken the terms of the two nations' oil export agreement by allowing the regional administration of Kurdistan to ship the product to the Turkish port of Ceyhan without Baghdad's consent. As a result, Turkey stopped pumping petroleum from Iraq, causing the Arab nation to halt about 450,000 barrels per day's shipments from Kurdistan.

The prevailing sentiment in the oil market now seems to be that fears of a major financial crisis from bank failures and takeovers have somewhat eased, but not entirely eliminated. Before escalating concerns, First Citizens announced it would buy deposits and loans from failed Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) to stabilize the market.