Oil Goes Berserk In Electronic Trading As WTI Passes $98

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Feb 22, 2011

As Zero Hedge advised in early January when the severity of the Maghreb revolution was made all too clear to anyone not willing to stick their head in the CNBC sand, oil could well be the buy of a lifetime ahead of a downward spiral of unprecedented geopolitical proportions. Sure enough, today alone, WTI (April) has surged from $90 yesterday to over $98 in electronic trading (see below). Either this is some computer gone haywire in the closed session, or when America wakes up tomorrow we may be on the verge of another flash crash. As for Brent, it passed $108.50. As a reminder, and people forget this all too readily, each dollar jump in crude wipes out $100 billion in US GDP.

That means that at face value, today’s move in the commodity complex, may have taken out as much as 5% of annualized GDP when fully processed through the economy!

 WTI (per netdania):



Brent:



And some crude observations from an otherwise calm Reuters:

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