This is also, to be fair, a market that has been wrong-footed by demand as much as by supply. Goldman Sachs' Daan Struyven has pointed to a four-to-five-million-barrel-a-day year-over-year collapse in Chinese crude imports as arguably the single biggest reason oil hasn't traded in triple digits more consistently despite the disruption. J.P. Morgan's research team reached a similar conclusion in July, forecasting Brent averaging $86 in the third quarter and $78 by year-end on the view that demand destruction, not supply recovery, has done most of the market's rebalancing work.
What the Futures Curve Is Actually Arguing About
Here's why two camps can stare at the same $91 print and walk away with opposite readings. Oil prices aren't a single number reflecting a single truth. A futures curve is a probability-weighted blend of scenarios: quick reopening, prolonged closure, full-blown escalation, all folded into one price. When Brent's front-month contract jumps 3% on a strike and the back end of the curve barely moves, that's the market saying it still expects this to resolve, eventually, toward something closer to normal. When deVere Group flagged in June that Brent's December futures were trading well below prompt prices even as the front end spiked, that gap was the market openly admitting it didn't fully believe its own near-term panic.
So the structuralists and the fade-traders aren't actually disagreeing about the facts. They're disagreeing about which time horizon those facts belong to.