Is the Oil Market Flashing a Potential Recession Warning?

Our Global Commodities Strategist Martijn Rats discusses the ongoing volatility in the oil market and potential macroeconomic scenarios for the rest of this year.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I’m Martijn Rats, Morgan Stanley’s Global Commodities Strategist. Today on the podcast – the uncertainty in the oil market and how it can play out for the rest of the year.

It’s Tuesday, April 29th, at 3pm in London.

Now, notwithstanding the energy transition, the cornerstone of the world’s energy system is still the oil market; and in that market, the most important price is the one for Brent crude oil. Therefore, fluctuations in oil prices can have powerful ripple effects on various industries and sectors, as well as on the average consumer who, of course, pays attention to gasoline prices at the pump. Now with that in mind, we are asking the question: what's been happening in the global oil market recently?

Earlier this month, Brent crude oil prices dropped sharply, falling 12.5 per cent over just two trading sessions, from around 75 dollars a barrel to close to 65 dollar a barrel. That was primarily driven by two factors: first, worries about the impact of trade wars on the global economy and therefore on oil demand, after the Trump administration’s announcement of reciprocal tariffs.

Secondly, was OPEC’s announcement that, notwithstanding all the demand uncertainty that this created, it would still accelerate supply growth, progressing not only with the planned production increases for May; but bring forward the planned production increases for June and July as well. Now you can imagine, when OPEC releases extra production whilst the GDP outlook is weakening, understandably, this weighs on the price of oil.

Now to put things into context, two-day declines of 12.5 per cent are rare. The Brent futures market was created in 1988, and since then this has only happened 24 times, and 22 of those instances coincided with recessions. So therefore, some commentators have taken the recent drop as a potential sign of an impending recession.

Now while Brent prices have recovered slightly from the recent lows, they’re still very volatile as they continue to reflect the ongoing trade concerns, the economic outlook, and also a strong outlook for supply growth from OPEC and non-OPEC countries alike. The last few weeks have already seen unusually large speculator selling. So with that in mind, we suspect that oil prices will hold up in the near-term. However, we still see potential for further headwinds later in the year.

In our base case scenario, we expect that demand growth will slow down to approximately 0.5 million barrels a day year-on-year by the second half of 2025, and that is down from an an initial estimate earlier in the year when were still forecasting about a million barrel a day growth over the same period. Now this slowdown – coupled with an increase in non-OPEC and OPEC supply – could result in an oversupply of the market of about a million barrels a day over the remainder of 2025. Now with that outlook, we believe that Brent prices could eventually drop further down into the low-$60s.

That said, let's also consider a more bearish scenario. Oil demand has never grown continuously during recessions. So if tariffs and counter-tariffs tip the economy into recession, oil demand growth could also fall to zero. In such a situation, the surplus we're currently modeling could be substantially larger, possibly north of 1.5 million barrels a day. Now that would require non-OPEC production to slow down more severely to balance the market. In that scenario, we estimate that Brent prices may need to fall into the mid-$50s to create the necessary supply slowdown.

On the flip side, there's also a bullish scenario where we and the market are all overestimating the demand impact. If oil demand doesn't slow down as much as we currently expect and OPEC were to revert quite quickly back to managing the supply side again, then inventories would still build but only slowly. Now in that case, Brent could actually return into the low-$70s as well.

All in all, we would suspect that the twin headwinds of higher-than-expected trade tariffs and faster-than-expected OPEC+ quota increases will continue to weigh on oil prices in the months ahead. And so we have lowered our demand forecast for the second half of the year to just 0.5 million barrels a day, year-on-year. And we’ve also lowered our prices forecasts for 2026; we’re now calling for $65 a barrel – that’s $5 a barrel lower than we were forecasting before.

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