The Unbearable Over-Determination of Oil
November 24, 2014·0 comments·adaptive investing
Oil has fallen $30 a barrel. Supply models say it shouldn't. Growth models say it can't stay here. Yet it has. Meanwhile, thousands of financial voices are racing to explain why, each offering an answer that, alone, accounts for the entire move. What happens when the market is simultaneously flooded with competing certainties and fundamentally unstable?
• Multiple explanations exist for the same outcome, each fully plausible on its own. A rising dollar could explain the entire $30 decline. So could oversupply. So could growth concerns. The problem isn't that we lack answers. It's that we have too many.
• Financial institutions are structurally compelled to supply these answers. When trillions in capital demand an explanation for large moves, advisors and allocators must provide one or lose clients. This creates an endless artillery barrage of competing narratives all screaming simultaneously.
• The sheer volume of shouted answers functions as a form of noise and pressure. Market participants without independent grounding get buffeted between contradictory explanations. Each time a new piece of information arrives, it triggers a mad rush toward whichever narrative seems to fit best in that moment.
• This competition for narrative dominance amplifies price volatility itself. It's not that more talking pushes prices in one direction. It's that when everyone is loudly arguing about their particular answer, all competing explanations get overweighted at once, creating wild swings up and down.
• The deeper question is whether any deterministic model can capture what's actually driving oil prices in such a structurally unstable environment. If the answer keeps shifting based on which narrative dominates public conversation, then what you're really tracking is not fundamentals or policy, but the game of consensus-chasing itself.
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