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  • Brett Spurr
    • Mar 31, 2020
    • 1 min read

Oil for a Beer

Oil prices have fallen from over $60 per barrel to $20 as a result of the Saudi-Russian price war and the lack of demand since the world shut down due to corona virus. There are other grades of oil besides the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) benchmark used here in North America or the Brent crude benchmark used in the rest of the world. Other grades are typically regional in nature. Currently, there are some grades of crude in North America that currently cost about $6 per barrel or less than the price of a pint of good beer. A barrel* of crude or a pint a beer! If this seems ridiculous, it is.


This is clearly unsustainable. Though investors may be tempted to buy oil stocks, there's a good chance many of the oil producers go bankrupt or need to borrow heavily just to survive which make the stocks less correlated to the actual crude price.


*a standard barrel of oil is 42 gallons

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