For a generation, the world’s oil market has depended upon surveillance of prices for crude passing through a handful of locations, with physical players in turn looking to the futures market for reassurance. If that system breaks down, this lodestar will be lost and confusion will reign.
THE best argument for taking a sanguine approach to oil prices collapsing into negative territory this week is that it’s strictly a local problem.
As my colleague Matt Levine has written, once you unpack what “oil prices” means, the bizarro-world implications of negative pricing aren’t so mysterious.
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