WHO’S BUYING THIS? NBC News Suggests Oil Prices Are Falling for ‘Worrisome Reason’

Spiking oil prices? Bad Trump! Falling oil prices? Er, also bad Trump! At least, that’s the double-edged sword logic NBC News is attempting to get readers to believe. NBC News business reporter Rob Wile made a wild, perfunctory leap to box President Donald Trump between a sandwich of equally deleterious scenarios regarding the Iran War in his April 14 item headlined, “Oil prices may be starting to come down for a worrisome reason.” In one of the most ludicrous media cases of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, Wile wielded the International Energy Agency’s crystal ball to scaremonger over the phenomenon of “demand destruction” to explain away the current downward trends of oil price benchmarks Brent Crude and West Texas Intermediate. It couldn’t possibly be that the end-of-times economic fear porn the media have been peppering readers and viewers with for the past few weeks turned out to be a load of propaganda dressed up in hyperbolic embroidery, right? Wile argued that “oil appears to have reached a point where it is now so expensive that overseas businesses and households have begun curbing investment and consumption.” But this is just speculative conjecture not grounded in reality, as Barchart Senior Analyst Darin Newsom analyzed in an item published the same day as Wile’s reversed-logic piece. As Newsom concluded, the “demand destruction” narrative doesn’t hold weight when looking at the market data: What would a bearish demand market show us, though? In other words, what would the forward curve look like if crude oil was actually staring into the abyss? My Blink reaction (based on the Malcolm Gladwell book Blink) is we would see a strengthening contango in the deferred contracts. A quick check across the Energies sector and I can’t find this anywhere. (I included the natural gas forward...