Dirk Lammers
November 19, 2008 - 4:05 p.m.

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) - Oil slipped below $54 a barrel Wednesday as stock markets across the globe fell and yet another U.S. government report illustrated just how far the nation's housing market has fallen.

Governments, businesses and consumers have slashed strength, which has halved the price of unripe since record highs in July.

Light, sweet crude as far as concerns December delivery fell 77 cents to settle at $53.62 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, about where prices were in January of 2007.

Macro forces drove falling crude prices Wednesday, reported Fred Rozell, retail pricing director at the Oil Price Information Service, through investors selling off in a "drove mentality," much as they crowded into the market over the summer.

Consumer prices plunged by the largest amount in the past 61 years in October at the same time that gasoline pump prices dropped by a record amount.

The Labor Department said Wednesday that consumer prices fell by means of 1 percent last month, the biggest one-month decline on records that go hindmost to February 1947. The drop was two times as large in the same manner with the 0.5 percent decline analysts expected.

For October, energy prices knock down by a record 8.6 percent, led by a 14.2 percent drop in gasoline prices, also a record. With no definitive signs that the economy is stabilizing, industry analysts look for energy prices will continue to fall.

The nationwide average for regular gasoline is now $2.07, down 33 cents seeing that the start of the month, according to the Energy Information Agency, and well below record-highs above $4 per gallon this summer.

Also dampening energy prices was more bad news from the housing industry.

Construction of recent homes and apartments fell by the agency of 4.5 percent in October to an annual tax of 791,000 units, the Commerce Department reported. It was the slowest construction pace on records going back to 1959.

Supply disruptions that one time roiled markets have not slowed crude's decline as falling demand has supplanted supply issues as the gravitational force on Nymex.

"Even reports of renewed rebel agility in Nigeria are not enough to spur a rally," Addison Armstrong, director of market scrutiny at Tradition Energy, said in a morning note.