NEW YORK–The price of oil fell slight­ly yes­ter­day as traders await­ed the lat­est re­port on oil sup­plies and gaso­line de­mand.Bench­mark oil for Ju­ly de­liv­ery fell 14 cents to fin­ish at US$93.31 a bar­rel on the New York Mer­can­tile Ex­change.Da­ta show­ing that man­u­fac­tur­ing ac­tiv­i­ty in the US slowed in the month of May boost­ed en­er­gy mar­kets Mon­day be­cause traders be­lieved the weak­er the econ­o­my could push the Fed­er­al Re­serve to con­tin­ue its mon­e­tary stim­u­lus mea­sures.

Traders will now be mon­i­tor­ing fresh in­for­ma­tion on US stock­piles of crude and re­fined prod­ucts. Da­ta from the En­er­gy De­part­ment for the week end­ing May 31 is ex­pect­ed to show a de­cline of 1 mil­lion bar­rels in crude oil stocks and a build of 1 mil­lion bar­rels in gaso­line stocks, ac­cord­ing to a sur­vey of an­a­lysts by Platts, the en­er­gy in­for­ma­tion arm of Mc­Graw-Hill.

The Amer­i­can Pe­tro­le­um In­sti­tute was ex­pect­ed to re­lease its re­port on oil stocks lat­er yes­ter­day, while the re­port from the En­er­gy In­for­ma­tion Ad­min­is­tra­tion–the mar­ket bench­mark–will be out on to­day.

AP