Oil dropped in the US because the current administration is depleting the strategic reserve. It's almost gone but the current administration doesn't care. The current administration punched down Trump attempting to top off the reserve for $24/barrel. Once the reserve runs out we'll be at 5.50 a gallon again but midterms will be over and I'm sure the other party will get the blame.
The whole point of the SPR is to deal with supply shocks. I know, it's weird to see an administration doing something that's actually popular while using the exact legal mechanism for achieving that popular thing. Frankly, I'm surprised too. Furthermore, the SPR was already at 90% of its all-time high when the previous administration proposed to top it off; enough perhaps to make a marginal difference, but not nearly enough to change the outcome of a drawn-out crisis.
> Oil dropped in the US because the current administration is depleting the strategic reserve. It's almost gone but the current administration doesn't care.
This is not exactly true, there are still hundreds of millions of barrels in the reserve, well over 50% of its alleged capacity.
While it is true that stock has been dropping more quickly in the past year, the reserve has been slowly depleting since February of 2017.
