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Goldman’s crystal ball: still cloudy, but less cloudy
Goldman Sachs analyst Nikhil Bhandari is basically saying the oil market’s weird detour through the Strait of Hormuz may start looking less chaotic by the second half of next year. His call: flows could normalize, crude could stabilize around $80 a barrel, and the market may stop acting like it just chugged three espressos.
Why you should care
That matters because oil is never just about oil. If flows improve, it could cool some of the panic premium baked into crude prices. But Bhandari also flagged a few annoying caveats that keep the story sticky:
- refinery infrastructure in parts of the Middle East and Russia may need longer to recover
- dark fleet movements are still reshaping shipping patterns
- crack spreads may stay unusually wide, which keeps refining margins elevated
In other words, even if the headline flow problem eases, the plumbing underneath the market still looks cranky.
The policy wild card
Bhandari also touched on export restrictions, including the idea that China could clamp down on product exports and that U.S. restrictions on diesel exports could push gasoline prices higher. That’s the sort of feedback loop policymakers love to create and consumers love to complain about.
For Goldman, this isn’t a “sell your oil stocks and move on” moment. It’s more like: the market may eventually calm down, but not before a lot more churn in prices, spreads, and shipping routes.
Big picture: if you’re trying to guess where energy volatility goes next, the answer is apparently “later, and probably not quietly.”