Liam Denning, Columnist

Trump's China Fight Shows Covid-19 Hasn't Changed Oil's World

The pandemic has merely highlighted the market’s pre-existing conditions.

May 29, 2020 at 12:39 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

President Donald Trump in Beijing, in happier times.
Photographer: Pool/Getty Images AsiaPac

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The big question haunting oil is how much Covid-19 has changed the world. Will more people give up on commuting or, conversely, drive into work? Has air travel peaked for good? Have Londoners and Angelenos been spoiled by a few haze-free months?

Judging from the past week, though, maybe oil’s real problem is the world hasn’t changed enough.