Liam Denning, Columnist

Gasoline Pulls Oil Prices Into Reverse

Supply is building up even as demand stagnates, meaning less appetite for crude.

November 9, 2018 at 3:25 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.

Not enough demand for this is hurting oil prices.
Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images Europe

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Strange as it may sound, gasoline is turning toxic for the oil market.

West Texas Intermediate crude oil dropped below $60 a barrel on Friday morning for the first time since early April. The go-to reason is that sanctions on Iran have been a damp squib (for now, anyway). But there’s also a more prosaic problem: The bottom has been falling out of gasoline. Nymex gasoline has dropped by a quarter since the end of August, a steeper slide than the fall of 2014, the beginning of the oil crash.