Overnight in the US, crude oil sellers started paying buyers to take the 'black gold' off their hands. It's the first time an oil futures contract has traded at a negative price.
Mr McNally also warned that global storage would start being squeezed if the COVID-19 pandemic kept large economies in effective lockdown for much longer.
The economic fallout globally from the coronavirus will be far worse than SARS now that China is so critical to the global, and especially Australian, economy, writes Ian Verrender. "Negative prices, or very low prices even in the single digits, are the market at work, it's the price mechanism telling producers: 'hey, cut it out, stop producing, we have nowhere to store and nowhere to refine your crude on planet Earth'," he told RN Breakfast.
According to Australian Institute of Petroleum figures quoted by CommSec yesterday, the average price of unleaded petrol fell by 6.8 cents to a four-year low of 107.2 cents a litre last week, with metropolitan prices a bit lower at 102.7 cents.
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