Ryan Cummings

Rings of Power season 3 comes out in a few months so I’m gonna do a lot more Tolkien posting

As Trump weighs escalation or a deal, he's confronting a harsh reality — the Russia and Iran fronts are coalescing, and the tools to manage the next energy shock are disappearing week by week. 🧵 1/ When the Hormuz MOU was announced, transit relief flowed to crude — not diesel, gasoline, or jet fuel. That gap is now the market's biggest vulnerability. 2/ Ukraine's systematic strikes on Russian refineries forced Moscow into a full ban on diesel exports — producers and traders alike. Russia is ~11% of global diesel supply!!! 3/ Refining margins — here and globally — are at record highs. Crack spreads are telling you refined products, not crude, are the real chokepoint right now. 4/ EIA / DOE itself is now flagging that Cushing, OK — the WTI crude delivery point — is at tank bottoms. Storage bottomed near 19M barrels in June, lowest since 2014, and has barely rebuilt since. 5/ The SPR is heading below 300 million barrels — territory we haven't seen in over 40 years. That's the shock absorber for the next disruption, and it's almost gone. 6/ China bought the world time, cutting imports by 4-5 million b/d at the peak of the shock. It's now re-entering the market — lifting fuel export curbs, restocking. That cushion may not be there next time. 7/ If Hormuz escalates again, the tools that existed in March — SPR headroom, Cushing storage, Chinese demand destruction — are shrinking every week. 8/ It's not just energy. The 10-year is near a two-month high at nearly 4.60%, and the 30-year has traded above 5% since July 7 — the bond market pricing in exactly the inflation risk this points to. 9/ At the pump: gasoline will likely rise above $4 again in days, diesel has already re-crossed $5.00 — both at or above levels last seen in 2022. 10/ Time to cut losses and make a deal. Markets are holding — but the tools to manage the next crisis are running out, and China may not bail us out again.

This is the least neutral I've ever been about an international football game that doesn't involve my countries and I'm hearing similar sentiments from basically everyone else

Imagine being French, in Paris, and able to watch the France-Spain match here. It would be such an abundance of joy that the cruetly of the world would be permanently laid to rest.

Final crude estimate for July 10 week. Total crude draw of 6.1 million bbls. SPR release slowed to 3 million bbls, with the current release rate coinciding with a floor of 300 million bbls. EIA owes us over 10 million bbls. We expect EIA's crude storage figure to be higher than our figure of -3.1 million bbls. We see EIA reporting -7 million bbls. Total crude draw could be closer to 10 million bbls. API is going to be bearish relative to EIA. If API reports -3 million bbls, EIA will report closer to -7 to -8 million bbls.