🇺🇸 Raymond Zaccaro (RVX Asset Management) just told Brandon the oil price you see and the oil price refiners actually pay have basically nothing to do with each other anymore.
China quietly killed a huge chunk of its own demand by shifting hard to high-speed rail and EVs, so it never needed to draw down reserves the way people assumed.
Meanwhile the U.S. SPR is already below 300 million barrels, dropped 6 million in a single week, and Zaccaro's blunt on this:
Keeping prices artificially low is actively making it worse, because cheap gas just tells people to top off the tank and stash extra cans in the shed. Real demand destruction never happens.
His scariest line: hit a hurricane, a cavern cave-in, any single shock right now, and there's no cushion left. WTI could spike past $100 overnight.
On China's long game, he's blunt: trying to choke off chip exports to slow them down is naive. He compares it to Samuel Slater smuggling textile-mill knowledge out of Britain to build American industry 2 centuries ago.
You can't stop the transfer of knowledge, and China's already producing its own lithography.
His sharpest point, though, is about who actually pays for sanctions. When the West sanctioned Russian bonds, American pension funds and insurers got forced to dump them at 20-30 cents on the dollar, and Russian entities bought their own debt back cheap.
Zaccaro's takeaway: sanctions hurt American investors more than the country they target, and it's why China and Russia are quietly exiting Treasuries for gold.
We're not heading toward multipolar, he says, we are already there, and the U.S. spent 3 decades abusing dollar supremacy into exactly this outcome.
@RayZucaro @WeTheBrandon
