London (Platts)--16Oct2009/647 am EDT/1047 GMT

The dollar-led movement in the crude complex continued Friday as the stronger US currency forced crude benchmarks down.

Both the NYMEX WTI and ICE Brent benchmarks traded at discounts to previous settles with the NYMEX WTI contract traded at $77.36/barrel, down $0.22/b at 1023 GMT.

The new front month ICE Brent contract traded at $75.86/b, a $0.37 fall.

In the currency markets the the ICE Dollar Index traded at 75.588, a 0.107 overnight rise.

In addition, Energy Information Administration data Thursday was seen as having bearish undertones, despite the large gasoline draw.

"Although we had draws yesterday, the fall in refinery throughput could feed into sentiment as participants profit take at these levels," a London-based broker said.

The EIA revealed a fall in refinery through-puts by 725,000 b/d to 14.295 million b/d for the week ending October 9. The decrease occurred across all regions of the US. A combination of slowing demand, deteriorating margins and seasonal maintenance was behind the sharp drop-off in gross inputs.

The drop in refinery throughputs caused output of every refined product across the board to decline with the steepest decrease being production of gasoline. Gasoline output fell 964,000 b/d to 8.453 million b/d with 687,000 b/d of that decline occurring along the Gulf Coast.

The EIA also reported a 5.23 million-barrel drop in inventories. At 209.159 million barrels, gasoline inventories were 10.093 million barrels above the five-year average and 15.371 million barrels above year-ago levels.

Gasoline demand slipped 13,000 b/d to 9.256 million b/d week-over-week, but on a four-week moving average gasoline demand at 9.11 million b/d, declined 0.9 percentage points from the previous EIA report.

--George Johnson, george_johnson@platts.com