The Takeaway: This feels right.
Oil Prices Tank
What Happened: Good news for anyone looking to become an artisanal oil baron: It’ll probably never be cheaper than it is right now, as oil prices plunge to literally less than zero. The bad news? Well, that’s bad news.
What Really Happened: As is obvious by simply looking outside your window—which is all anyone can really do right now, and even that will just show some empty streets—everyone is living in a changed world these days. One of the more obvious, and perhaps surprising, signs of that change arrived last week when this happened to the price of oil.
Yes, oil prices went negative for the first time in history. That seems kind of important, right?
Oh. So, yeah. It’s pretty important. But, and this is admittedly a bit of a stretch for what is a massive problem for a global economy that has now cemented that data is more valuable than oil, what if this is … actually a good thing?
OK, so it’s not actually a good thing, even if you know that you thought roughly the same thing for just a couple of seconds at least. (Also—spoiler alert—the idea that unrefined crude will go bad quickly is not actually true.) Yet the news did bring about a surreal moment where people realized how much the world has changed from just a few weeks ago.
If all of this is freaking you out a little, don’t worry—President Trump is on it.
Yes, the federal government can’t provide for its struggling citizens and is, apparently happy to let states go bankrupt because they paid for coronavirus responses and won’t be reimbursed, but a bailout package for oil companies? Of course!
There’s only one thing for it: Everyone needs to buy oil while it’s worthless, then set themselves up as oil companies and get a piece of this action. You know it’s the smart option.
