Oil’s Doom: Goldman Sachs Foretells a World Drowning in Greed and $120 Barrels

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Ah, the sweet scent of catastrophe! From the marble halls of Goldman Sachs, a prophet of our age, Daan Struyven, emerges to whisper the inevitable: the Middle East, that eternal crucible of human folly, shall once again plunge the world into chaos. The oil, that black lifeblood of our civilization, is to dwindle, and with it, the fragile veneer of our prosperity.

In a solemn discourse with Bloomberg, Struyven, co-head of global commodities research, declares with the gravity of a man foretelling the apocalypse that a mere 90% of Persian Gulf oil production shall be restored by December. A trifling matter, you say? Nay! For in this lies the seed of our undoing. Two billion barrels lost-a sum so vast it could drown the dreams of a thousand speculators. “Twenty percent of global oil inventories,” he intones, his voice heavy with the weight of our collective hubris.

“We estimate that the world will lose cumulatively about two billion barrels of Persian oil production by year end. To put that in perspective, that is roughly 20% of global oil inventories in the whole world.”

And what of the price, you ask? Ah, the price! Struyven, with the precision of a surgeon carving open the chest of truth, predicts Brent crude ascending to $90 by the fourth quarter. But fear not, for in the worst of times, when the strait of Hormuz chokes on its own bitterness, the price shall soar to $120, perhaps even higher. A recession, he warns, shall follow, like a faithful hound snapping at the heels of the vulnerable-emerging markets, Africa, Asia, and the weaker brethren of Europe.

“Our Brent upgrades to $90 a barrel by the fourth quarter. That’s $30 higher almost than our forecast before that would be even higher, around $100 per barrel if we did not incorporate some significant demand losses. We now look for global oil demand to stagnate, even if at the start of the year we were looking for pretty solid well, demand growth just above a million barrels per day.”

And yet, as the world teeters on the brink, Brent Crude, that fickle mistress, trades at $117 a barrel. A mere prelude, perhaps, to the grand tragedy that awaits. For in the words of the prophet Struyven, “The strait never opens more than 70%,” and in that lies the true horror-a world choking on its own greed, its ambitions strangled by the very oil that once fueled them.

“But if you go to the severely adverse scenario that we consider, where you get one month of additional delays in normalization of Persian Gulf export flows and some damage to oil production capacity, either damage to infrastructure or the possibility that the strait never opens more than 70%, in that scenario, we see Brent at $120, even by the fourth quarter, product prices arguably would be significantly higher as well. And in that scenario, the probability of recession for various economies goes up, I would say, especially in countries that are more vulnerable, emerging markets, Asia, in Africa, frontier economies, potentially some European countries as well.”

At time of writing, Brent Crude Oil (BRENT) is trading at $117 a barrel. The stage is set. The players are in motion. The curtain rises on a drama of greed, folly, and the inevitable march toward our own undoing. Will we learn from this? Doubtful. For as the great Dostoevsky once wrote, “Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys.”

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2026-05-01 10:47