Spot Life of CL Oct '08 (wk 2)

Hurricane Ike, the OPEC decision and Saudi Arabia's role in it, and demand destruction has been the spot life of CL Oct '08 the last 7 days of trading. Hurricane Ike appears to have veered away from the center of Gulf production and so is not causing so much worry at this stage, or so it seems. Here is the current track, courtesy of the NOAA:



(The largest concentration of infrastructure is more or less centered on the Texas-Louisiana border.) Below is an image, courtesy The Oil Drum (which itself is courtesy of Simmons & Co.) of the deep water infrastructure in the Gulf. (Although I tend to think Oil Drum analysis veers toward the alarmist, the site contains a wealth of information and informed analysis.



In any case, here is the table of reported causes for price changes for the last 7 days of trading:



Here is the Dollar vs the Euro vs spot CL Oct '08:



And here are the forward month differentials for CL:



Very unusual structure here. You can see that on Sep 2nd, the market went into "perfect" contango, where every single contract is more expensive than the one that expires before it. I haven't been watching that long, but I've never seen that before. Notice that the differential between spot and Dec 2016 narrows from a little over $7/b to a little more than $4/b.