Title: The oil markets are 'sleepwalking' while the Trump administration manipulates the narrative: CIO
Show: CNBC International
Guest: Josh Young (Founder & CIO, Bison Interests)
Date: 2026-JUN-11
URL: https://youtu.be/J5wgWHShO2Q
Length: 7:30
Note: CNBC Q&A — interviewer lines prefixed ">>" kept (they are the questions Josh answers). Fillers (um/uh/"you know" as interjection/contentless "sort of"/"I mean"/"right?") and stutters/false-starts removed; wording, numbers and names otherwise verbatim. Every (mm:ss) line preserved.

(00:00) What do you make of a President Trump talking about how the strait has been open for a number of months already that the world didn't really know about it, but there has been some secret escort mission. Do you get a sense that he is trying to sort of neuter the market function of it all in a sense? And this is really the similar type of question that I would ask about what he tried to do with the Federal Reserve and so on.
(00:32) But what was your take away from that line? >> Yeah, it's so interesting. I think the Trump administration's actually been manipulating the price of oil or at least the narrative around oil for over a year now in different ways, whether it was with the replacement of the leadership in Venezuela and promising a huge flood of oil or essentially misrepresenting the status of the Iran war since it started and even lying about deals ahead of time.
(01:04) And this isn't really a partisan observation. It's more of a, as a participant in the oil market and an investor in oil and gas equities, it's important I think to have open eyes in terms of what's happening. And so this manipulation has happened historically and when it's happened historically with commodities, it's led to physical shortages.
(01:25) And so on one hand, it's always surprising to see this sort of manipulation work. It's shocking every single time to see market participants, a world leader who can in the short term affect the supply demand balance through SPR releases, through various other things and then also just through pure jawboning.
(01:49) That being said, there's an inevitable result of this, whether it's in the short term where on the current trajectory, if the strait remains in the current status. If Trump wants to call it open, that's great. Currently, it's net effectively closed. If it stays in the current status, as you could see in that chart before, >> [laughter] >> the inventories are just declining rapidly and we're going to end up sadly, it's sort of funny and also potentially tragic, we could end up with real severe shortages and we're
(02:17) sleepwalking into that. So that's the real risk to the extent that the situation doesn't change dramatically and doesn't change in the next, let's say, 60 days. >> Maybe his administration or President Trump himself is trying to buy time to get to this optimal level of diversification like we saw with Japan and how they now have a deal with Malaysia's Petronas assigning a 20-year LNG supply deal.
(02:51) And I was just going through your social media posts and you're actually counting the number of deals or announcement of deals and now we're on to number 39. Let's say that one doesn't stick and then there's another one, that one doesn't stick. But maybe he's trying to sort of roll over the significance of the Strait of Hormuz.
(03:21) What do you think about that? >> Yeah, almost certainly that's happening and that is leading to a lower price for oil than you would expect if you use just a pure correlation model like most oil market analysts used up until this crisis to figure out what the fair price for oil would be at any given time.
(03:42) You basically just look at global commercial inventories and compare it to price and look at a historical regression line and you can get to a real good fit in terms of what the price should be over time versus inventories. We've already broken that through this jawboning process. And again, the risk there is that we end up with shortages, but there is a flip side.
(04:03) There is a real economic, so if you ignore the war aspect, there's a real, frankly, enormous economic benefit to the US from this. The US is a major hydrocarbon net exporter and a major producer of very capital intensive oil and oil products and then refined products and so on. And so this is extremely good.
(04:28) It doesn't feel like it, but it's extremely good for the US economy. And we're seeing a number of different sectors and subsectors that feed into the oil industry, as well as services companies within the oil industry, as well as companies that are buying this stuff and then using it. They are benefiting enormously from this general trajectory.
(04:51) And so the longer that Trump is able to sustain this oil market in limbo and frankly sustain the crisis, this is a very beneficial situation for the real industrial aspects of the US economy. So that's a huge point. I think people overlook it because of the geopolitical aspects of the war, as well as the potential pain for consumers at the gas pump.
(05:16) That being said, consumers have money because they work. And if their labor rates go up because there's more demand for whether it's oil drillers or whether it's truck drivers or anyone in this very large multi-million person supply chain for US oil and US hydrocarbons, those folks are benefiting and they could benefit a lot more to the extent that prices go higher and stay higher for longer.
(05:45) >> Yeah. And I really appreciate the color that you've given us just now in that response about how this can benefit the US energy profile as an exporter and all of that. And maybe that's the reason why President Trump doesn't have a lot of appetite to really sign this deal and open the Strait of Hormuz again and go for peace with Iran.
(06:10) That maybe he needs actually more time to drag it out. >> Yeah, it's very possible or it's possible that this is this conflation of this America first re-industrialization economic policy along with Trump's it's supposed to be non-interventionist, but it's this realignment foreign and geopolitical policy.
(06:37) And so this current situation does seem to play into both of those and I thought it was worth exploring some of the ways in which the US economy and US workers actually benefit from higher oil prices and benefit from the current situation just so it's not that the Trump administration is unaware that people are counting the number of fake ceasefires and the number of the best Iran deals ever whether again it's 27 or 39 and there's different ways to count this.
(07:07) It's, I think that they accept that and then also are pointing to enormous investment figures in the US and actually resilient economic figures that it seems to surprise a number of different economic pundits who were expecting much more economic weakness here in the US since the Iran war started a few months ago.