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(Bloomberg) -- Of all the wild, unprecedented swings in financial markets since the coronavirus pandemic broke out, none has been more jaw-dropping than Monday’s collapse in a key segment of U.S. oil trading. The price on the futures contract for West Texas crude that is due to expire Tuesday fell into negative territory -- minus $37.63 a barrel. The reason: with the pandemic bringing the economy to a standstill, there is so much unused oil sloshing around that American energy companies have run out of room to store it. And if there’s no place to put the oil, no one wants a crude contract that is about to come due. Underscoring just how acute the concern is over the lack of immediate storage space, the price on the futures contract due a month later settled at $20.43 per barrel. That gap between the two contracts is by far the biggest ever. “The May crude oil contract is going out not with a whimper, but a primal scream,” said Daniel Yergin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning oil historia

NEW YORK (AP) — A barrel of oil now costs less than a cheap bottle of wine. U.S. benchmark crude was trading as low as $6.50 a barrel Tuesday, more than 80% lower than the start of the year. The dizzying drop reflected stark suffering in the global economy that has left vastly diminished demand for oil. There’s little mystery around the sharp drop-off: Efforts to limit the spread of the coronavirus have major cities around the world on lockdown, air travel has been seriously curtailed and millions of people are working from home, leading to far fewer commuters on the roads. B ut pumps are still running, extracting oil from the ground, and all that oil has to go somewhere. Some brokers were betting that storage would be more valuable than oil next month, leading some on Monday to   pay potential buyers to take oil off their hands . Many analysts saw Monday’s prices as limited to the peculiar nature of some contracts, but Tuesday’s drop signaled the industry is in for a prolonged

NEW YORK (AP) — Oil prices crumpled even further Tuesday, and U.S. stocks sank to their worst loss in weeks as worries swept markets worldwide about the economic carnage caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The market’s spotlight was again on oil, where prices have plummeted because very few people are flying or driving, and factories have shut amid widespread stay-at-home orders. Global demand is set to drop to levels last seen in the mid 1990s. At the same time, oil producers can’t slow their production fast enough, and all the extra crude means storage tanks are quickly running out of room. The cost for a barrel of U.S. oil to be delivered in June plunged 43% to $11.57. That’s the part of the market that oil traders are focused on and trading most actively. For oil to be delivered next month, which is when storage tanks could top out, the cost of a barrel stood at $10.01. A day earlier, it fell below zero for the first time, meaning traders paid others to take oil off their hand

S tocks ended Thursday’s mixed session modestly higher, after another surge in  U.S. weekly unemployment claims  and a slump in new-home construction underscored the depth and breadth of the coronavirus’  impact on the domestic economy , while officials debate a strategy to restart public life. Initially, investors reacted badly to the news that new jobless claims topped five million for the week ended April 11, which brought the four-week total to more than 22 million. Still, equity traders mostly looked past the data toward President Donald Trump and state governors moving toward a consensus on slowly reopening the economy. Meanwhile, Wall Street — which has been aggressively discounting stocks in anticipation of the coming economic calamity — is gradually looking ahead to better days. “The stock market seems to count job layoffs the same way they read the curve of new positive coronavirus cases and think that 5.245 million jobless claims this week is better and lower than the