Commodity markets produce a particular kind of story when supply gets tight, and the story always sounds the same: the buffer is gone, the cushion has vanished, the system is about to seize. The current version has a name, tank bottoms, referring to the minimum crude volume required to keep oil moving from wellhead to refinery at all.

The claim is that the world is approaching it. Like most such narratives it contains something true and a great deal that is not, and separating the two matters because policy decisions are being made on the assumption that the panic is correct.

Trade officials from the two largest economies held a video call on Thursday that both sides described in cordial terms. On Friday the Department of Homeland Security added 43 Chinese companies to the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act Entity List, a 30 percent expansion and the largest in the statute’s five-year history, reaching into aluminium, lithium, gold, capacitors, textiles, pharmaceuticals and snack food.

Beijing’s Commerce Ministry noted the sequence explicitly on Saturday, condemning the action as an unfounded unilateral sanction arriving one day after what it called a constructive exchange, and promising necessary measures to protect Chinese firms without specifying them. Whether the timing was deliberate or merely bureaucratic, the message received in Beijing was the same.

OPEC+ approved a production increase of roughly 188,000 barrels per day from September, formally completing the phased unwinding of a 1.65 million barrel per day voluntary cut first agreed in 2023. In ordinary conditions that would be a substantive supply event. In present conditions it is paperwork.

Successive monthly increases through most of this year have remained largely theoretical, because the Iran and Ukraine wars have disrupted exports from the Gulf, Russia and Kazakhstan to a degree that makes quota ceilings irrelevant. A permission to produce more is worth nothing to a country whose tankers cannot leave port.