Crude

Japan's 9.0 earthquake is most likely a non-event for the crude oil, but the nuclear power basically has met its Deepwater Horizon.

As Gulf stock markets celebrate the lack of Days of Rage in Saudi Arabia on Friday, Bahrain is again reminding that not every country can buy the undying love of its citizens.  Per the AP, "thousands of anti-government demonstrators cut off Bahrain's financial center and drove back police trying to push them from the capital's central square - shaking the tiny island kingdom Sunday with the most disruptive protests since calls more freedom erupted a month ago." As a reminder, in February, Bahrain was the location of some of the most graphic atrocities against protesters. Since then, a swift surge in pressure from Saudi to moderate tensions resulted in an uneasy "ceasefire" although that now appears to have ended. "Demonstrators also clashed with security forces and government
supporters on the campus of the main university in the Gulf country, the
home of the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet." And as we pointed out before, should the Bahrain situation reach melting point, religious tensions across the area are sure to flare up: "The clashes fueled fears that Bahrain's political crisis could be stumbling toward open sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, who
account for 70 percent of the nation's 525,000 people."Add to this resumption of violence the fact that there was another round of protests in Saudi Arabia in front of the Interior Ministry on Sunday, and the "good" news from Friday are now long forgotten.

A just released report by Goldman's Jeffrey Currie attempts to quantify the impact of the Tsunami on the Japanese economy from a commodity standpoint. Currie summarizes his conclusions as follows: "Assuming that the broader power grid infrastructure has not been permanently damaged, we believe today’s events are likely to put upward pressure on residual fuel oil and diesel cracks, LNG, UK natural gas and rice; downward pressure on naphtha cracks and Dubai spreads relative to other crude grades." Yet the thing we found more interesting than energy related bottlenecks was the disclosure toward the end of the report discussing the threat to the Japanese rice harvest: "In addition to the damage to energy infrastructure from the earthquake, the tsunami also impacted rice producing regions in Japan. While Japanese rice inventories are large, this puts the 2011/12 crop production at risk and may in turn drive Japanese rice imports higher, posing upside risk to current prices." Granted, Japan is not a big exporter of rice, but it is a top 10 consumer. Should the country's consumption (which is estimated at around 9 million metric tons) need to be satisfied by a surge in imports, and with the price of rice already dependent on the margin on speculative money, this could be the catalyst that send the grain, which has plunged in price over the past month, finally break beyond any potential manipulative price suppression schemes.

After Nomura released a report two weeks back predicting oil could rise to $220 if the MENA situation escalates, this morning SocGen's Michael Wittner has released his own scenario analysis on the possible outcomes of the 2011 revolutions. His three cases see oil within the following escalating thresholds: $110-$125; $125-$150; and $150-$200. We are fairly confident that the worst case, which as expected involves all sorts of bad things happening in Saudi Arabia, is missing an extra zero somewhere. Some key observations from the report (attached below): "The forward curve for Brent, the better indicator of global oil market fundamentals, is currently in backwardation (nearby premium, forward discount) for the next 5 years, reflecting concerns over growing physical tightness in the crude markets. The oil markets are pricing in an extended Libyan shutdown of crude exports (see below). Even on the WTI forward curve, where prices are still under pressure from local mid-continent US market conditions, the contango has eased and now only extends through 2011; from 2012 through 2015, WTI is also in backwardation. As the Libyan crisis has escalated, the latest US CFTC data show that non-commercial net length for NYMEX WTI futures has reached an all time high. This is a key indicator that a new wave of investor flows is now moving strongly into WTI and the oil complex in general. With the widespread unrest in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region expected to continue, and the oil markets worried about further supply disruptions, the attractiveness of commodities and oil to investors has been underscored. With oil prices driving heightened concerns over inflation, oil itself is seen as a good hedge against inflation." In summary, SocGen sees about $15/bbl risk premium built into current prices, which could jump to as much as $110.

It is one of those days when the flight to new reserve currency is on, with gold and silver trading near overnight highs, same for the oil complex, yet futures are also at the highs of the premarket session, purely on the ongoing monkeyhammering in the dollar, which has now completely given up the ghost as the reserve currency on yet another bout of QE3 concerns, following last night's very cautious note from Jan Hatzius. At last check the DXY was at 76.135 and plunging. As for why oil will continue whacking bits and pieces of Q1 GDP, and why Goldman will have no choice but to push for another round of dollar rape, here is Reuters with the skinny: "Brent crude rose to $118 a barrel and U.S. oil hit the highest since September 2008 on Monday as fighting in Libya disrupted its supplies and renewed concern of wider disruptions in the Middle East. While the Libyan crisis has cut supply from a country that normally provides almost 2 percent of world output, the prospect of unrest spreading to larger producers such as Saudi Arabia is a far more bullish scenario for oil markets. "The major risk remains the prospect of the political unrest spreading to the Gulf producing region," said Caroline Bain, economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit. "However, even if there is civil unrest in Saudi Arabia, it is not a given that oil production will be affected." Wrong: it is a given.

With ICE and CME margin hikes - that last bastion of supply/demand imbalance suppression - no longer having an impact on crude price, it was only a matter of time before the last theatrical measure in the price arsenal was used.  Per Dow Jones: "White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley said on Sunday the Obama administration is considering tapping into the U.S. strategic oil reserve as one way to help ease soaring oil prices." Speaking on NBC television's "Meet the Press," Daley said: "We are looking at the options. The issue of the reserves is one we are considering. ... All matters have to be on the table." There has been support among Senate Democrats for tapping the reserves. Senator Jay Rockefeller on Thursday became the third Democrat to ask President Barack Obama to tap America's emergency oil supply to cool prices that have risen past $100 a barrel on the strife in Libya." What our esteemed politicians fail to realize that tapping the SPR is analogous to Lehman filing an 8K declaring to the world it is now tapping directly into the Fed's discount window for its liquidity - that didn't end too well. The problem with the SPR is that as a non-marginal replacement of supply it is largely a puppet: with a capacity 726.7 million barrels, the SPR holds a 34 day reserve at the US daily consumption of 21 million barrels. The picture is slightly better when considering that the US only imports 12 MMbd, meaning there is a 58 day supply. But the biggest issue that nobody is considering, is that the maximum total withdrawal capacity is physically limited to just 4.4 million barrels per day. In other words, should the MENA escalation flare up, there is no way to physically replace all the lost output. Yet what is most troubling is that even as the US is about to start using up its reserves, Asia is actively shoring up its oil, meaning that as our own oil buffer gets ever smaller, Asia could easily dictate economic terms over the OPEC cartel as soon as a few months from now if the Bernanke liberation wave does not end any time soon.

Two weeks ago Zero Hedge claimed that Saudi Arabian "gestures" to hike crude output were about as hollow as the heads of those suggesting that dealing with surging oil prices involves reducing interest rates even more (which just happen to be at zero already), mostly as a result of the country's recent adoption of "whorism" or its doomed strategy to buy the love of its citizens. The reason is that as UBS' Andy Lees noted, Saudi "will need to ramp up production by about 10% (more capital spending) without prices falling" to fill the suddenly gaping budget hole left from literally throwing $37 billion out of Bernanke's leased helicopter. Yesterday, BusinessWeek's Peter Coy essentially reaffirmed our theory verbatim in the piece "Saudi Arabia Must Keep Pumping Oil to Buy Stability"... needless to say we completely agree with this. Obviously, the bigger issue here is that as WikiLeaks recently suggested, and was reconfirmed by Jim Rogers, Saudi Arabia is simply lying about its excess capacity. Because if Saudi had indeed raised output as many have hoped for, and as Saudi has represented, it would have made up for the funding differential simply by the hike in export volume. Instead, as Reuters reports, Saudi Aramco just hiked prices on oil to customers in Asia and Europe up substantially. This, at least to us, does not appear like the rational action of a player seeking to moderate surging oil prices to avoid further social conflict, and one who can plug offline capacity.

The CME Group Inc. increased margins its New York Mercantile Exchange crude oil and petroleum products futures, effective after the close of trading today. The margin for Nymex crude oil will rise to $6,750 per contract from $6,075, while heating oil margins increase to $6,413 from $5,063 and gasoline to $6,750 from $5,400, the exchange said in a notice late yesterday. The attempts to prevent an out of control melt up in the one product everyone is terrified of, crude, are back on the table. Just like last week, when the ICE started and the CME followed suit, look for today's CME action to be promptly immitated by the ICE on Brent.

With crude prices bid up so much, traders are left with a dilemma - to be in the crude oil trade, players basically either have to take delivery, or rollover.

While the equity market resumed its now traditional (for the past 6 months) smooth levitation, with little to no volatility and even less volume, the most interesting asset class was silver, which after dropping to under $32 yesterday, following the various attempts by the administration to kill assorted commodities, rose by 4% today, closing at the day's highs and wiped out the entire loss from yesterday. Ironically, this happened even as general collateral rates rose today. "The reason for the rise is an increase in the volume of Treasury securities available to be used in the repo market as general collateral. The Treasury Department on Friday settled an issue of $25 billion in 49-day cash management bills, and the $99 billion in new notes it auctioned this week will settle on Monday." Of course, this was offset by another 56-Day CMB offsetting the winding down SFP (total SFP holdings are now cut in half to just $100 billion). So despite a major liquidity extraction from the market, not only did stocks rise (which can traditionally be attributed to POMO in a low volume environment), but the biggest beneficiary was silver, meaning that even in a tight liquidity regime, most investors now prefer to pursue commodities as an investment class, something which had not happened previously.

As usual, our Onionesque predictive powers are spot on. Two hours ago, when we reported the ICE margin hike, we stated: "We expect the NYMEX will follow suit on its own WTI contract margin hike any minute." 60 minutes later, this prediction comes true. Per Bloomberg: "CME Group’s New York Mercantile Exchange plans to raise margin requirements on its light, sweet crude oil contract for the first time since March 2009, according to the exchange. Margins for speculators will increase to $6,075 per contract from $5,063, and for hedgers to $4,500 from $3,750, according to a notice on the CME’s website. The change will take place after the close of trading tomorrow." The heavy artillery in crude is out. And while margin hikes do nothing any more for silver and gold, the weak hands in crude have at least two rounds of margin hikes before they are flushed out. Of course, the half life of margin hikes is about 2-3 days. We expect this increase to be internalized very quickly. The next one will be priced in within hours. And the third one will be ignored. After that... who knows.

If anyone is alive after today's utterly insane trading action, congratulations. The volatility lull of the past 6 months is now over: swaption traders rejoice.

Update: U.S. government has no reason to believe that Gaddafi is dead

Just a completely unfounded rumor for now. If it proves false, watch the vicious snapback...

Those following the move in WTI this morning may wonder what the catalyst for the ongoing retracement has been. According to Italian sources (the country most affected by developments in Libya so take it with a grain of salt), OPEC is meeting in Riyadh to evaluate hiking crude supply in light of Libyan developments. This mirrors a less definitive statement issued earlier by the Kuwait oil minister that "OPEC could call an emergency meeting if required by disruption to oil supply due to Middle East unrest." As a reminder after peaking WTI at $98.25, it since pared gains to under $95.75, and was trading at $96.11 last. So while Bernie Bernanke can always print dollars, it is up to OPEC to print oil. And the market seems to be satisfied for now with promises of such.

There was a time, long ago, when the dollar was a flight to safety instrument. Those days are gone. DXY barely budging as the overnight session begins, while silver has already put $34 in the dust. Last: $34.26 and parabolic.