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On July 11, when the price of crude oil peaked at $147.27 per bbl., SemGroup, a major oil distributor based in Tulsa, Okla., was only a week or so away from a potential $5 billion payoff. Instead, the company imploded. And soon afterward, so did the price of oil, dropping some 60% in the subsequent months, to a recent price below $60.
Clearly, demand for oil didn't fall that much, but the price of oil isn't set by demand alone. It's the product of an extremely volatile mixture of speculation, oil production, weather, government policies, the global economy, the number of miles the average American is driving in any given week and so on. But the daily price is actually set — or discovered, in economic parlance — on the futures exchange. In late June and early July, speculators in oil futures battled one another, suspecting that a top was near. In the ensuing weeks, oil would come crashing down to earth as traders everywhere — including hedge funds, banks and pension funds — unwound their positions. And as SemGroup demonstrated, getting the timing wrong on this great unwind can have catastrophic results. (Read "Iraq's Pain at the Pump.")
SemGroup was short oil. Massively. That is, it had bet that the price was going down by contracting to sell millions of barrels of oil it did not own at a future date, on the assumption that the price would fall and SemGroup could supply the barrels at a lower price and pocket the difference. Three days after oil peaked, as it still threatened new all-time highs, the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) called margin on SemGroup, forcing the firm to put up more cash collateral to back its losing positions. Unable to raise the capital, SemGroup sold its entire crude-oil futures position the very next day to Barclays investment bank. SemGroup posted a $2.4 billion loss in the process, forcing the company into bankruptcy.
Given that SemGroup lost that much money as oil prices soared, it must have amassed a short position of at least 100 million bbl. of crude — that's about five times what the U.S. has on hand at any given moment. Had SemGroup bought back the oil on the open market, oil prices would have continued to skyrocket, feeding off the frenzy. Fortunately for consumers, Barclays was ready to assume SemGroup's position.
But there's far more to oil's big price plunge. SemGroup, of course, was now out of business, and as similar behavior came to a halt at other firms, oil lost its upward momentum. Enter the financial crisis, which dealt the finishing blow. The dollar had weakened during the first revelations of the mortgage crisis, but as that situation spun out of control into an international credit crisis, the currency markets favored the U.S. dollar. Since oil is traded internationally, as the dollar gained value, the price of oil in dollars had to come down. A weakening dollar played a role on the way up; a strengthening dollar on the way down. But the euro has dropped only 20%, and oil, three times that. So currency is not the whole story but certainly is a major trigger. (Read "Four Steps to Ending the Foreclosure Crisis.")
Stock prices, too, began to tumble as talk of bailouts and rescue plans permeated the media. The price of oil began to fall, and speculators had to put up more money for margin, but their other investments were simultaneously declining. Thus, they were forced to close out their long positions and sell oil. As everything spun out of control, everyone wanted out: a full liquidation. Even diversified investors tend to hold long positions in commodities as inflation hedges. Losses in stocks forced these long speculators to liquidate their positions in all commodities.
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With speculators' positions massively leveraged, holding only a fraction of the value of the oil they had purchased, they scrambled to cover losses. Not only did oil prices go down, but other assets also declined significantly. The further oil prices went down, the more deleveraging and liquidation had to occur to cover these losses. The financial crisis was the spark; deleveraging, the fuel. A chain reaction occurred as traders who had bought oil saw their money disappear in oil and other losing investments. And with a credit crisis looming, major players interested in maintaining a long position could not raise capital to cover margin requirements.
This deleveraging also occurred among investment banks. The failings of major financial institutions have directly fueled the decline in oil prices. Many banks' internal commodities-trading funds — Citigroup, for instance, owns Phibro, a major commodities trader — have generated excellent returns over the past few years.
Translation: the banks were long on oil and probably helped effect high oil prices. But with these banks failing, and prices already declining, they too closed out those long positions and helped bring prices lower. Oil prices may have risen on panic, and fear may have played a role in their recent fall. The mechanism of the fall, however, was a massive liquidation.
Where, might you ask, does demand and supply of the commodity come into play? Maybe in an economics textbook somewhere. Perhaps the credit crisis will slow demand somewhat, but certainly not enough to split the price in half. True, recession may be upon us, and that might help justify lower oil prices, but that fear is not the real story behind the fall. Remember: it was not great prosperity that doubled the price.
This is not the story of oil as a commodity but instead the story of traders who transact in the future price of oil. These are the same traders who previously brought this price to record highs. The price of oil went up tremendously; the price of oil crashed. Unfortunately for consumers, the story is not over yet, and we're just along for the ride.
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- Ari J. Officer
- How bad mortgages, a rising dollar and a huge bet on crude set the stage for oil's price plunge