4 entries tagged oil. All writing.
OCTOBER 6, 2026 Aramco's CEO Says Under 6 Billion Barrels Remain. Under 6 Billion of What? Saudi Aramco's chief executive told a London conference that less than six billion barrels of commercial oil inventories remain, "the vast majority not practically available." A viral post set that beside JPMorgan's "operational floor" of 6.8 billion and implied the line had been crossed. The two numbers measure different things, and the real warning in his speech is somewhere else. OCTOBER 6, 2026 CME Dropped 24/7 Oil Trading. "Staffing" Is the Smallest Reason. On Friday CME Group withdrew its filing for a 24/7 oil futures contract, and a widely shared post made it sound like an exchange that couldn't find weekend staff. The record is stranger and more useful than that — a regulator's stay in July, a stated worry about unintended consequences, and a list of objections in which staffing is the least interesting one. SEPTEMBER 16, 2026 The Demonstration The Fed hiked a quarter point on Wednesday, 12 to 0 — unanimous, from a committee that voted 9 to 3 to hold in July. Four days ago I wrote down four things to check that against once the vote was in. Here is what actually happened to each one. SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 A Rate Hike Against a Strait On Friday the inflation number came in at 3.4 percent and the futures market moved to better than 85 percent odds that the Federal Reserve raises interest rates next Wednesday. Take energy out of that 3.4 and it reads 2.4 — a whisker from the target. So the Fed is about to raise the price of money in the United States against a number that is mostly a closed strait on the other side of the world. I wanted to know whether that has ever worked, so I went back through five oil shocks and looked at what the Fed did each time.