Can crude oil be sold at a negative price? Well, it just happened. A contract for future delivery on the West Texas Intermediate mart has famously notched a minus rate per barrel.
In effect, this would mean someone will pay someone for that oil. This reflects not just a vast glut in the market, an upshot of the Great Lockdown that has shut off combustion engines that wheel and wing people around the world, it also speaks of high oil storage costs.
America is pumping more of the black stuff out than there is space for. Globally, a market that was once slurping up 100 million barrels a day is estimated to be burning just 70 million nowadays—enough of a demand crunch to send any commodity’s price crashing.