NEW YORK (AP) ? Oil rose Friday after a see-sawing session in post-holiday, low-volume trading, but was down slightly for the week.
The benchmark for crude oil in the U.S. rose 60 cents to settle at $96.77 a barrel. It dropped $1.84 on Wednesday, before markets in the U.S. were closed for the Thanksgiving holiday. On the week, however, oil lost 0.7 percent.
Oil had fallen earlier as Europe's debt crisis continues to undermine confidence the continent will avoid recession next year.
In London, Brent crude for January delivery fell $1.38 to settle at $106.40 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.
Investor concern that fiscal austerity measures aimed at lowering Europe's debt levels will hurt global economic growth and oil demand has helped pull crude back from above $103 last week.
Uncertainty about contagion spreading from Greece to Portugal, Italy, Spain and Ireland has begun to undermine confidence in Germany and France. The yield on Germany's 10-year bond rose above the 10-year UK government bond for the first time since 2009. And on Friday Standard & Poor's downgraded Belgium's financial standing, citing the country's government stalemate and the looming European recession.
"The eurozone sovereign crisis is starting to threaten the bond markets of even the most solid European economy ? Germany," Barclays Capital said in a report.
In the U.S., meanwhile, the average price for a gallon of gas has fallen to $3.31 (87 cents a liter) from $3.38 in just a week. The discount is an even heftier 20 cents a gallon (3.8 liters) compared with two months ago. In fact, American shoppers driving from store to store on the first weekend of the holiday shopping season are paying some of the lowest prices for gas since late winter.
Even with the recent declines, however, the price of gas is 44 cents a gallon higher than on Black Friday a year ago. Tom Kloza, chief oil analysts at Oil Price Information Service, says Americans are on track to spend $488 billion on gas this year. That will eclipse the record set in 2008 by $40 billion. OPIS said last week that U.S. households have spent 8.4 percent of their income on gasoline this year, up from 6.7 percent in 2010 and 7.9 percent in 2008.
The national average for gasoline peaked just below $4 a gallon ($1.05 a liter) in May.
That may be one reason that malls are bustling this year with shoppers looking marked down cashmere sweaters, videogame consoles, tablet computers and flat-screen televisions. Retailers hope shoppers reinvest their savings at the pump. Kloza estimates that, at current demand, for every 10 cent decline in the price of gas, Americans save a total of $36 million to spend elsewhere.
Kloza says current demand for gas in the U.S. remains "extraordinarily poor." That's the main reason why gas prices are dropping even though oil has risen about $17 a barrel, or 21 percent, in the last two months.
In other Nymex trading, heating oil dropped 3.1 cents to $2.94 per gallon and gasoline futures lost 4.45 cents to $2.5205 per gallon. Natural gas added 5.7 cents to $3.665 per 1,000 cubic feet.
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