Oil is taking another dive

Oil is diving again on Wednesday.

The commodity's miniature rally on Tuesday looks to have been a tiny positive hiccup in the otherwise grim story of its ever increasing spiral downwards.

Brent crude, the major European benchmark, started Wednesday at $38.44 (£25.62) per barrel, up around $0.40 or 1.05% from the start of trading on Tuesday.

But this morning the benchmark has taken another tumble, dropping by around 2.7% as of 10.35 a.m GMT (5.35 a.m. ET). This makes Brent the biggest faller of any widely traded commodity right now.

It also means Brent has fallen below $38 (£25.32) per barrel once again, something that until last Friday, it had not done in more than seven years.

Here's what the price of European crude oil looks Wednesday:

West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the generally cheaper American benchmark is also back to declines on Wednesday morning, albeit not as severe a Brent. WTI is down by roughly 0.8% today, hovering just above the $37 (£24.66) mark.

The gap between the two benchmarks has now closed to just $0.80 per barrel, signalling the first real narrowing of since the start of the shale oil boom in the USA, according to Reuters.

Elsewhere in the commodity markets, the price of natural gas is continuing to plunge, thanks to the unseasonably warm weather on the east coast of the USA, which has lowered demand for the fuel substantially.

Having fallen to a 16-year low on Tuesday, natural gas has dropped by as much as 2% this morning, to a low of $1.782 (£1.19) per million British thermal units.

In equities, oil's return to losses doesn't seem to be worrying European investors too much, with the FTSE100 currently seeing gains of around 0.7%, and Germany's DAX trading up by 0.3% from the morning's open, at 10,484.8 points.

Here's the FTSE: