Despite renewed geopolitical risk on the oil market hailing from the Middle East, oil prices were down on Friday morning and set for a weekly loss as profit-taking weighed more on the price of oil than the Iraq-Kurdistan standoff and increased U.S.-Iran tensions. At 9:55 a.m. EDT on Friday, WTI Crude was down 0.31 percent at $51.35, while Brent Crude was trading down 0.09 percent at $57.18. Both benchmarks rallied somewhat around noon EST, to $51.59 for WTI and $57.48 for Brent. “There’s a little bit of profit-taking…The market has really been treading a small range all of this week without any true momentum,” Olivier Jakob, chief strategist at consultancy Petromatrix, told Reuters on Friday. At the beginning of this week, Iraq moved to take control of oil fields in oil-rich Kirkuk from Kurdish forces, while the market was still digesting last Friday’s decision of U.S. President Donald Trump […]