"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
Perhaps true when this article first appeared, but FT reports US oil price below zero for first time in history.
These prices are for short-term future contracts, and I suppose a plain-language explanation is that some traders were willing to pay people who would promise to take some grades of surplus oil off their hands in the next few weeks.
Spot prices remain positive, but not by much.
- Not all oil contracts are trading in negative territory. Brent, the international benchmark, lost 8.9 per cent on Monday to fall to $25.57 a barrel, but is less immediately afflicted by storage issues.
Brent is a seaborne crude allowing traders to easily ship it to areas of higher demand. Amrita Sen at Energy Aspects said: “With Brent you can put it on ships and move it around the world immediately. Storage tanks at Cushing, however, will be full in May.”
WTI contracts for delivery in June lost 14.7 per cent but held above $20 a barrel, though traders warned it could face further losses. Both benchmarks traded above $65 a barrel as recently as January.
My second goofy oil vs. Big Macs wager, based on the Cushing, OK spot price, was looking bad for the first four years, and 2026 still seems far away.
