I heard last nite most all of the worlds tanker ships were full and were sitting waiting to find some buyers.
The well-funded who could afford to lease (and can find one) a tanker and skeleton crew for a year could buy at current spot prices, purchase a futures contract to sell in a years time at the agreed and much higher price, fill a tanker, park it off some coastline somewhere, netting roughly $2m per tanker when they deliver in a years time and have fully paid up the lease. If things carry on like this the counterparty risk of doing so (and/or insurance costs to cover it) are going to go through the roof and make it pointless but we sure do live in interesting times.
It wouldn't surprise me in this batshit crazy world, if some funds have done just this, built portfolios of tankers/contracts, packaged the portfolio/s into a 'security', borrowed against them, or sold the derivatives to an ever-dodgier phalanx of financial gurus who then borrow against these contracts, and the lenders have then sold derivatives of these securities to bag-holders around the world who, through the financial miracle of rehypothecation will be staring at a few hundred billion dollars in losses when the SHTF.
If I can hope for one good thing to come from the Chinese flu and incoming gobal financial meltdown, it's that we collectively pull our heads out of our ***** and value far more the producers, healers, educators, and develop an enduring and palpable disdain for usurious money-changing parasites.
Oh, and converting volumes and dollars, 95 octane petrol has dropped to about US$4.60 a gallon here. No complimentary jar of petroleum jelly either.