Spiking oil prices? Bad Trump! Falling oil prices? Er, also bad Trump! At least, that’s the double-edged sword logic NBC News is attempting to get readers to believe.
NBC News business reporter Rob Wile made a wild, perfunctory leap to box President Donald Trump between a sandwich of equally deleterious scenarios regarding the Iran War in his April 14 item headlined, “Oil prices may be starting to come down for a worrisome reason.”
In one of the most ludicrous media cases of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, Wile wielded the International Energy Agency’s crystal ball to scaremonger over the phenomenon of “demand destruction” to explain away the current downward trends of oil price benchmarks Brent Crude and West Texas Intermediate.
It couldn’t possibly be that the end-of-times economic fear porn the media have been peppering readers and viewers with for the past few weeks turned out to be a load of propaganda dressed up in hyperbolic embroidery, right? Wile argued that “oil appears to have reached a point where it is now so expensive that overseas businesses and households have begun curbing investment and consumption.”
But this is just speculative conjecture not grounded in reality, as Barchart Senior Analyst Darin Newsom analyzed in an item published the same day as Wile’s reversed-logic piece. As Newsom concluded, the “demand destruction” narrative doesn’t hold weight when looking at the market data:
What would a bearish demand market show us, though? In other words, what would the forward curve look like if crude oil was actually staring into the abyss? My Blink reaction (based on the Malcolm Gladwell book Blink) is we would see a strengthening contango in the deferred contracts. A quick check across the Energies sector and I can’t find this anywhere. (I included the natural gas forward curve to again highlight my deep appreciation, and wonderment, for those who make a living trading the Widow Maker.) In other words, talk of ‘demand destruction’ seems to be just that – talk.
But Wile foolishly tried to make this talking point stick in order to make it seem like no matter which way prices go, Trump loses and everyone should be upset with his gambit to decapitate the Islamist regime in Tehran. “The report comes as President Donald Trump has announced a targeted blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in a bid to increase economic pressure on Iran. The global economy has so far proven resilient — but that may soon change,” Wile teased.
There is a massive problem with stories like this that are based on what-ifs and could-bes: They’re not news. If anything, they’re engineered to manipulate news by triggering impulsive behaviors based on pure speculation, especially as it pertains to stock trading.
As Fox Business senior correspondent Charles Gasparino posted on X March 8, commodity traders “trade off headlines, totally myopic in short-term thinking and predicting.” It’s the same tactic the media attempted when they tried to make it seem like Trump’s tariffs were steering the U.S. economy into a brick wall, which never happened. Now, it appears Wile and others are trying to shoehorn that same strategy into their Iran War coverage by putting logical consistency on the chopping block for the purpose of hopefully triggering the very catastrophe they’re bleating is just around the corner:
[Demand destruction is] a phenomenon likely to affect global economic growth. And while it does not yet appear to be affecting the U.S. economy, any impact would threaten to destabilize an already fragile labor market.
Ridiculous.
