Exactly six months ago, when oil bulls still held on to some fleeting hope that OPEC may somehow stabilize the crash in oil prices despite the shift in marginal oil production from low-cost OPEC producers to U.S. shale (a hope which is now gone as the just disclosed letter from Andy Hall demonstrates), Goldman noticed something troubling : an unprecedented collapse in gasoline demand. As the firm’s energy analyst Damien Courvalin said on February 8, when discussing the 6 percent fall in U.S. gasoline demand, such a plunge “would require a U.S. recession” and add that “implied demand data points to U.S. gasoline demand in January declining 460 kb/d or 5.2 percent year-on-year. In the absence of a base effect, such a decline has only occurred in four periods since 1960 during which time PCE contracted.” Now, 6 months later, the situation is very much different: with the U.S. […]