Goldman Sachs says March oil has a $100 problem

The oil market’s war math keeps getting more expensive. Goldman Sachs $GS -0.41% said in a Friday note that it expects Brent to average above $100 a barrel in March, a jump from where the bank’s forecasts sat just days ago and another sign that Wall Street has moved from pricing a geopolitical scare to pricing a supply squeeze.

Oil traders can flirt with triple digits for a day or two and still tell themselves that a scary story will have a happy-ish ending. But an average above $100 is different. It means the market is suddenly pricing in persistence — ships disrupted, infrastructure damaged, and the world’s most important energy choke point bottlenecked. Brent for May traded at $100.13 early Friday after hitting $119.50 on Monday, its highest level since mid-2022.

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Goldman is still basically arguing that the market is living through a violent geopolitical squeeze now and a normalization story later. In a Thursday note, the bank said it expects Brent to average $98 across March and April before easing to $71 by the fourth quarter, and the bank moved its West Texas Intermediate view to $67 from $62, after extending its assumptions for any Strait of Hormuz disruptions.

But in a harsher scenario — a full month of severe disruption — Goldman said the March—April average could hit $110, and spot prices could even break above the old 2008 peak of $147 if flows stay depressed through March. The bank now assumes 21 days of flows at just 10% of normal levels, followed by 30 days of gradual recovery; earlier, it had been modeling only a 10-day disruption.

That’s the difference between a scary print and a scarier forecast. The market is trying to price war, shipping risk, and time all at once, which is how things get ugly — fast.

More than 20% of global oil flows move through the Strait of Hormuz; other analysts still expect prices to stay elevated in the near term as they size up the damage from the Iran war and the continued supply disruption. Yes, Goldman still thinks Brent can ease back into the low $70s later this year, but that ending comes with a giant asterisk: If the disruption drags on for two months, the bank says its fourth-quarter average Brent estimate jumps to $93 from that $71.

Goldman has been moving in this direction.

On March 2, days after the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran, the bank was still describing crude as an $18-a-barrel “real-time risk premium” — the sort of phrase that suggests markets are nervous, but still basically functional. By March 4, Goldman had raised its second-quarter Brent forecast to $76 and said its outlook was “heavily tilted to the upside,” warning that a longer disruption in the Strait of Hormuz could push prices high enough to destroy demand and keep inventories from getting dangerously thin.

Friday’s note goes further than that warning. The bank is telling clients that the war premium has lasted long enough to become the month’s price. That presses on inflation bets, squeezes transport and factory costs, and gives every rate-cut forecast one more reason to look too confident in a world that has become very bad at reopening chokepoints on schedule.

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