On the morning of April 20, 2020, the front-month West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures contract closed at minus thirty-seven dollars and sixty-three cents per barrel — the first negative settle in the eighty-year history of regulated US oil futures. Holders of the May contract, facing imminent physical delivery in Cushing, Oklahoma at storage tanks that had no remaining capacity, were paying buyers to take the barrels off their hands. The episode was a logistics failure dressed up as a price collapse: the world had produced more oil than it could store on land, and pipeline-end storage at Cushing had run out of room.

Within a few weeks of the negative-price episode, the time-charter equivalent rates for the world's largest crude oil tankers — the Very Large Crude Carriers, or VLCCs — had spiked from roughly thirty thousand dollars per day pre-crisis to over two hundred thousand dollars per day, with intraday spot prints reaching approximately two hundred fifty thousand dollars per day at peak in late April 2020.