Demand Destruction Has Begun
One month ago, Brent jumped above $100/bbl for the first time in eight years as Russia executed a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and it became clear that western governments would impose sanctions. The oil market has been in triple digits for practically the entire time since.
And, after a month of oil prices we have not seen in nearly a decade and weeks of record-high fuel prices, JPMorgan has published a research report (available to pro subs) which finds that high-frequency data suggest that consumers are beginning to react resulting in what the Fed has desperately wanted to achieve all along: commodity demand destruction.
That said, high prices are clearly not the only demand-destructive force in the world at the moment, however. The crisis in Ukraine, crippling financial sanctions in Russia, and the continued spread of the highly infectious Omicron variant in China have an even more direct impact on regional fuel consumption than high prices.
As a result, JPMorgan has cut 1.1 mpd off its 2Q22 demand forecasts, followed by about 0.5 mbd cuts to both 3Q and 4Q. On net, this trims 420 kbd on average from the bank’s expectations for 2022 global oil demand as high prices, COVID restrictions, and geopolitical conflict drive demand destruction in Russia, China, India, and Europe.
While the US has been relatively isolated so far (despite the highest gasoline prices on record), JPM’s demand revisions are heavily concentrated in Europe, which remains the epicenter of the geopolitical shock. Since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, the bank’s economists have downgraded the growth in the region by over 2%-pts and have raised inflation forecasts by nearly 3%-pts.
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