Oil prices just took a massive dive and reached a jaw-dropping new low.
On Monday afternoon, West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures for May fell more than 300 percent to a record low of about negative $37 a barrel, Fox Business reports. This was the first time ever that WTI crude oil futures traded at a negative price, Bloomberg reports.
CNN reports "the selloff can be attributed in part to market mechanics," as "the May futures contract for West Texas International, the U.S. benchmark, is about to expire." And amid declining demand during the coronavirus crisis, The Associated Press notes that "traders don't want to get stuck owning crude with nowhere to store it," especially as "concerns grew that storage tanks in the United States are near capacity and unable to hold all the unused crude," as The New York Times writes.
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"In English," CNN's Julia Chatterley said Monday, "what that means is producers will actually have to pay a buyer in order to take oil off them."
The historic drop throughout the afternoon to mere cents and then less than $0 was stunning to witness, though, with CBS' Kathryn Watson tweeting earlier in the afternoon, "Who would have thought we'd see the day where a roll of toilet paper was about 30 times more valuable in terms of what people will pay than a gallon of oil." Putting things even more in perspective, Axios' Dave Lawler at one point tweeted, "a barrel of oil is now cheaper than a barrel of monkeys."
