American oil crashes below $0 a barrel -- a record low

Toopy14

Toopy14

Axe-Master
As a former student of economics, in all of my discussions with professors in my economics classes, I never would have imagined seeing a headline like this.

"At one point, oil fell to $-1.43 a barrel. That's the lowest level since NYMEX opened oil futures trading in 1983."

"Oil storage facilities are still at risk of overflowing, raising the chance that some oil producers in the United States and Canada could start paying customers to take crude off their hands.."

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/20/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
 
Manny Kuhn said:
It is currently dancing around -$35. I can't even wrap my head around it. Crazy.
Click to expand...

I'm tempted to hire somebody with an excavator to dig a huge hole in the backyard and get paid $35 a barrel to have it filled. Then, when this nightmare is over, sell it for $100+ a barrel! Pretty sure the neighbours and ministry of the environment would have something to say about it though. Not so sure it would be good for my well water though! lol
 
Watched some discussion of this today. In a nutshell the experts said that all the big holding tanks everywhere are full due to lack of demand (my car's tank is still full from my fillup 5 weeks ago - lol). But oil producers can't simply turn the taps off as it is very expensive to do so (all kinds of shut down processes required and sometimes not even possible as the wells may not be "designed" to be shut off). In some cases, wells that cost many millions to get going would require millions to shut down, and in some cases can only be shut down in a permanent way. So there's no place to put the stuff and they can't easily stop producing it - hence - price goes negative. Crazy times. Ever since watching The Beverly Hillbillies as a kid in the 1960s I never thought of oil anything other than "black gold"! - Not anymore (though in the last couple of years it's been far from "gold" status.
 
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