NYT article on the divergence of oil futures and physical oil prices

The article: [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/business/energy-environment/iran-oil-prices.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/business/energy-environment/iran-oil-prices.html) For some reason Reddit classified NYT's article's content as AI generated and won't let me post the full content, so I'll post snippets of it: > On Tuesday, before President Trump said the United States and Iran had reached a cease-fire agreement, a commonly cited price of Brent oil, the European one, was about $109 a barrel. That was well below highs reached in 2022, when that price briefly topped $130, without adjusting for inflation. > But in the market where energy companies buy and sell liquid oil transported on ships, the price was almost $145 a barrel, a record and more than double the price before the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, according to Argus Media, a company that tracks commodity prices. ... > The futures and spot prices are rarely exactly the same, but the gap between them has grown unusually big in the past few weeks, so much so that oil executives and analysts say futures prices no longer accurately reflect the extent of the supply shock that the world is experiencing. > “The futures market is not representing the on-the-ground and on-the-water reality of oil at all,” said Vikas Dwivedi, global energy strategist at Macquarie Group, an Australian financial services firm. “It’s quite broken.” ... > Spot and futures prices often diverge during big market disruptions, such as the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. International upheavals magnify the difference between the value of oil today and two months from now. > But the spread between the two prices in recent days dwarfs that of any other period in the past 20 years, Argus data show. Even energy analysts have struggled to explain why that gap is so large this time.