The international Brent crude benchmark crawled closer to $50 a barrel in early Asian trade on Wednesday as outages in Africa and Canada and production declines outside of the Middle East fueled expectations for tighter supply. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in June recently traded at $48.44 a barrel, up $0.13 in the Globex electronic session. July Brent crude on London’s ICE Futures exchange rose $0.10 to $49.38 a barrel. “While $50 sounds high today, this time two years ago it was about $100. I continue to believe from now going into 2017, dips should be bought as the market rebalances,” said Stuart Ive, a client manager at Wellington, New Zealand-based OM Financial. Oil prices rose overnight, propelled by reports that Canadian forest fires forced more evacuations […]