April 21, 2020

Oil Didn’t “Crater” Today. It’s Been Cratering for Two Months.

Did the price of oil “crater” today? You decide! Here’s the price of Brent crude, which provides a look at an international benchmark that’s not affected by storage issues in Cushing, Oklahoma. As you can see, it’s been dropping steadily all year, and the decline accelerated at the end of February when COVID-19 started to hit the economy. Today it fell 15 percent, which is a pretty healthy drop. On the other hand, today’s decline just put it back on the approximate trendline it’s been following for the past two months.

So it’s not so much that oil cratered today, it’s that oil has been plummeting by about 1 percent per day ever since February 20. The question is: how long will it keep doing this?

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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