![]() ![]() ![]() We can make informed guesses, and the oil decline went down a well-marked path, but these brief but significant negative numbers were still remarkable, foreseeable in the short term, but wild in the long. The unforeseen happens regularly, and then not a few people forget that it does and look forward to a foreseeable future all over again and pretend they foresaw what surprised them, flatten the bump back into their smooth version of reality. I had been watching, I’d heard predictions this was going to happen, because this was foreseeable a few weeks beforehand, but probably inconceivable a few months before when oil was at $60 a barrel. “Owing largely to a quirk in the way that oil prices are set, the May benchmark actually fell into negative territory, suggesting people who had oil to sell were willing to pay to have it taken off their hands,” noted the New York Times. The price of oil as I write (on Monday, April 20), or rather the benchmark of West Texas crude oil with May delivery, is negative $37 a barrel and while there had been recent predictions that we were heading this way, it is still a wild event and not one most who weren’t studying the context carefully could’ve foreseen. ![]()
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