What are the key takeaways from this Odd Lots episode?

Key insights include: **Oil price ceiling:** Despite 60-plus days of Strait of Hormuz closure, oil sits near $100 per barrel rather than $200 because strategic petroleum reserves globally are being drawn down rapidly, bypass pipelines are operating at capacity, and roughly 5 million barrels per day of demand destruction has occurred — primarily in lower-income nations like Pakistan and Bangladesh rather than major economies.; **Food price lag:** Global food supply is currently abundant — wheat and dairy are in surplus — but US wheat planting acreage in 2025 hit its lowest level since 1919. Farmers facing negative margins on fertilizer-to-corn price spreads are reducing plantings now, meaning a meaningful food price squeeze is 6–12 months away, not visible in today's grocery prices.; **Fertilizer front-loading:** European farmers purchased 60–80% more fertilizer than normal in November–December 2025 to beat the January 2026 Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism tax, which adds up to €120 per ton on imported urea. This stockpile has cushioned the 2026 planting season, but once inventories clear, import prices will rise sharply due to both CBAM and competing demand from India.

What did Javier Blass and Lorcan Roche Kelly discuss on Odd Lots?

Recorded live in London on May 7, Bloomberg's Odd Lots hosts Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak with commodity specialist Javier Blass and Irish Farmers Journal editor Lorcan Roche Kelly about why oil, food, fertilizer, and electricity prices are behaving unexpectedly amid the Strait of Hormuz closure and global supply disruptions. Key topics include: **Oil price ceiling:** Despite 60-plus days of Strait of Hormuz closure, oil sits near $100 per barrel rather than $200 because strategic petroleum reserves globally are being drawn down rapidly, bypass pipelines are operating at capacity, and roughly 5 million barrels per day of demand destruction has occurred — primarily in lower-income nations like Pakistan and Bangladesh rather than major economies.; **Food price lag:** Global food supply is currently abundant — wheat and dairy are in surplus — but US wheat planting acreage in 2025 hit its lowest level since 1919. Farmers facing negative margins on fertilizer-to-corn price spreads are reducing plantings now, meaning a meaningful food price squeeze is 6–12 months away, not visible in today's grocery prices..

How long is this episode of Odd Lots?

This episode is 30 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

Odd Lots

Why the Price of Oil, Beef, Electricity, and Everything Else Makes No Sense

May 18, 2026

30 min episode · 2 min read

Javier Blass,Lorcan Roche Kelly

Episode

30 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Fundraising & VC, Product & Tech Trends, Economics & Policy

AI-Generated Summary

Published May 18, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓Oil price ceiling: Despite 60-plus days of Strait of Hormuz closure, oil sits near $100 per barrel rather than $200 because strategic petroleum reserves globally are being drawn down rapidly, bypass pipelines are operating at capacity, and roughly 5 million barrels per day of demand destruction has occurred — primarily in lower-income nations like Pakistan and Bangladesh rather than major economies.
✓Food price lag: Global food supply is currently abundant — wheat and dairy are in surplus — but US wheat planting acreage in 2025 hit its lowest level since 1919. Farmers facing negative margins on fertilizer-to-corn price spreads are reducing plantings now, meaning a meaningful food price squeeze is 6–12 months away, not visible in today's grocery prices.
✓Fertilizer front-loading: European farmers purchased 60–80% more fertilizer than normal in November–December 2025 to beat the January 2026 Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism tax, which adds up to €120 per ton on imported urea. This stockpile has cushioned the 2026 planting season, but once inventories clear, import prices will rise sharply due to both CBAM and competing demand from India.
✓Electricity vs. oil shock distinction: European wholesale electricity prices, using Germany as a benchmark, peaked near €1,000 per megawatt hour in 2022 and now sit around €80 — close to the pre-crisis norm of €50–75. Unlike oil, electricity directly determines business survival; a Paris baker's monthly bill went from €800 to €7,000 in 2022. The current crisis has not replicated that electricity shock, which limits broader economic damage.
✓OPEC structural fracture: The UAE's departure from OPEC represents a larger threat than previous exits by Indonesia, Qatar, Ecuador, or Angola because the UAE holds 4.5 million barrels per day of production capacity and targets 5 million-plus. Combined with a potential post-election Venezuela re-entering production, a market-share race among former OPEC members could structurally suppress oil prices over the medium term.

What It Covers

Recorded live in London on May 7, Bloomberg's Odd Lots hosts Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak with commodity specialist Javier Blass and Irish Farmers Journal editor Lorcan Roche Kelly about why oil, food, fertilizer, and electricity prices are behaving unexpectedly amid the Strait of Hormuz closure and global supply disruptions.

Key Questions Answered

•Oil price ceiling: Despite 60-plus days of Strait of Hormuz closure, oil sits near $100 per barrel rather than $200 because strategic petroleum reserves globally are being drawn down rapidly, bypass pipelines are operating at capacity, and roughly 5 million barrels per day of demand destruction has occurred — primarily in lower-income nations like Pakistan and Bangladesh rather than major economies.
•Food price lag: Global food supply is currently abundant — wheat and dairy are in surplus — but US wheat planting acreage in 2025 hit its lowest level since 1919. Farmers facing negative margins on fertilizer-to-corn price spreads are reducing plantings now, meaning a meaningful food price squeeze is 6–12 months away, not visible in today's grocery prices.
•Fertilizer front-loading: European farmers purchased 60–80% more fertilizer than normal in November–December 2025 to beat the January 2026 Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism tax, which adds up to €120 per ton on imported urea. This stockpile has cushioned the 2026 planting season, but once inventories clear, import prices will rise sharply due to both CBAM and competing demand from India.
•Electricity vs. oil shock distinction: European wholesale electricity prices, using Germany as a benchmark, peaked near €1,000 per megawatt hour in 2022 and now sit around €80 — close to the pre-crisis norm of €50–75. Unlike oil, electricity directly determines business survival; a Paris baker's monthly bill went from €800 to €7,000 in 2022. The current crisis has not replicated that electricity shock, which limits broader economic damage.
•OPEC structural fracture: The UAE's departure from OPEC represents a larger threat than previous exits by Indonesia, Qatar, Ecuador, or Angola because the UAE holds 4.5 million barrels per day of production capacity and targets 5 million-plus. Combined with a potential post-election Venezuela re-entering production, a market-share race among former OPEC members could structurally suppress oil prices over the medium term.

Notable Moment

Lorcan Roche Kelly revealed that the US cattle herd is at its smallest in 75 years, yet major beef processors like Tyson are losing roughly $150 million per quarter processing beef — meaning neither farmers nor processors are profiting from record retail beef prices, which are instead driven purely by supply scarcity.

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Episode Transcript

Odd Thoughts is brought to you by VanEck. For years, investors basically forgot about real assets, energy, gold, and infrastructure, but look at what's driving markets now. Central banks loading up on gold, massive CapEx cycles, currencies doing weird things, these assets are at the center of it. Racks, the VanEck real assets ETF, is an actively managed one stop shop for real assets spanning gold, commodities, natural resource equities, and more. Go to vanek.com/raaxpod to learn more fun disclosures later in this episode. Sending a file is easy. Making sure your clients understand the file is the hard part. But with PDF spaces in Adobe Acrobat, you can give your clients the full picture with custom intros, audio summaries, and a helpful AI assistant to your docs. So if you wanna stop the endless follow ups, do that with Acrobat. Need to make your docs crystal clear? Do that with Acrobat. Want to make sure your clients get everything they need to hear? Do that with Acrobat. Learn more at adobe.com slash dothat with Acrobat. Small businesses are the pulse of every community. They bring people together, create opportunities, and drive growth. Chase for business helps business owners like you with personalized guidance and convenient digital tools all in one place. With that guidance and your determination, you can take your business farther and help build a brighter future for your community. Learn more at chase.com/business. Chase for business. Make more of what's yours. The Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase Bank, NA. Member, FDIC. Copyright 2026, JPMorgan Chase and Company. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. And I'm Jill Wiesenthal. This is a very special live recording of the podcast. We were over in London for our first ever UK live show. I love going to London. It was a little anxious, putting on a live show, selling tickets and stuff in London. You never really know who's gonna, like, show up in another city, but it is a great time. We had a great turnout. We had some great conversations. It was great to meet some of the fans and listeners there. I really loved it. And, yeah, I really enjoyed the, live episodes that we record. Absolutely. And we had some great guests as well. And what you're about to listen to, two of the perfect guests, really, I think, for this topic. Obviously, commodities is still making all the headlines Yeah. Really. So we decided to get two of our favorite commodity specialists. Both of them have been on the podcast before. We spoke with Javier Blass. He is, of course, our colleague over here at Bloomberg. He's a Bloomberg opinion columnist, author of The World for Sale. And we also spoke with one of our former colleagues, Lorcan Roche Kelly, who not only is a business editor at the …

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