Oil traders are taking on an “overly bearish tone,” paying too much attention to Trump’s tweets, macroeconomic fragility and expected U.S. shale growth. “We think more critical and bullish determinants of the oil price and oil price volatility in the year ahead are worth reviewing,” Barclays wrote in a March 3 report. While there are plenty of signs that the global economy is slowing – weak car sales and manufacturing data from China, flat growth in Europe, and a slowing GDP rate in the fourth quarter for the U.S. – oil demand has held steady. The main source of uncertainty and oil market instability this year, Barclays says, is how OPEC+ responds to U.S. government policy. That’s a tricky conclusion since U.S. policy, as well as the decision-making process, is itself impossible to predict. But while many other analysts have argued that Trump’s actions are increasingly one of the […]