It’s been a long time since oil market supply/demand was based on physical barrels rather than financial flows:
As the Wall Street Journal reported:
“Dozens of hedge-fund managers and oil traders attended a series of closed-door meetings in recent months with OPEC leaders—the first of their kind, according to Ed Morse, Citigroup Inc.’s global head of commodities research, who helped organize some of the events.”
These developments destroyed the market’s key role of price discovery:
There was never any logic for commodities to become a separate new asset class. A share in a company has some value even if the management are useless and their products don’t work properly. Similarly, bonds pay interest at regular intervals. But oil does nothing except sit in a tank unless someone turns it into a product.
The impact of all this paper trading was enormous. Last year, for example, it averaged a record 1.1 million contracts/ day just in WTI futures on the CME. Total paper trading in WTI/Brent was more than 10x actual physical production. Inevitably, this massive buying power kept prices high, even though the last time that supplies were really at risk was in 2008 when there was a threat of to hit $147/bbl.
