🇮🇷🇺🇸 Hormuz is choking off again, the president is talking about plots on his life, and the oil market barely blinked. The futures curve explains the silence...
Jeff Snider reads that curve like a cardiogram, and what it shows is strange: flat from front to back, an 8-cent prompt spread, benchmarks drifting toward contango days after missiles flew.
Under a pure supply crisis you'd see panic in the near months.
Instead the market keeps asking a darker question: who will still be buying oil three months from now?
His answer starts in China, which never showed up for the cheap barrels everyone promised.
Auto sales cratering, producers calling Asian buyers who say they don't need anything.
Layer an energy shock onto economies already limping, and you get the classic recession case, the one where demand destruction does the strait's work for it.
The biggest casualty in his book isn't in Asia at all.
Europe was flirting with the edge for years, and German industrial production already sits at 2010 levels, Great Recession territory, before this war takes its bite.
The ECB's "Europe is in a good place" mantra, he says, was self-hypnosis.
And if full war returns? Prices pop at the front of the curve, then demand craters harder.
The shock cuts both ways.
@JeffSnider_EDU
