US oil prices turn negative as demand dries up
So they start off the article with this statement:<p>"That means oil producers are paying buyers to take the commodity off their hands over fears that storage capacity could run out in May."<p>This statement is actually totally false. Producers already got paid for this production a long time ago when they initially sold the futures contract. What has actually happened is that as the expiry of the May futures contracts arrives, the traders who bought those contracts are now trying to unload them at all costs. This is because if they're stuck holding the contract at expiry, they have to take physical delivery (each futures contract represents 1000 barrels of oil), and the cost of storing that oil is getting really high since the storage facilities are nearly full.<p>Later they kind of explain this in the article:<p>"The severe drop on Monday was driven in part by a technicality of the global oil market. Oil is traded on its future price and May futures contracts are due to expire on Tuesday. Traders were keen to offload those holdings to avoid having to take delivery of the oil and incur storage costs."<p>But I think it's pretty irresponsible journalism to kick off the article the way they did, and imply that producers are paying you to take their oil today.