Full tank

摘要

IT SOUNDS like a scene from "The Big Short", a film about financial speculation. Light aircraft fly photographers close to America's oil-storage facilities, using infra-red imaging and photographs to gauge the rise and fall of levels of crude in 2,100 storage tanks, in an attempt to work out whether oil futures are overvalued or not. In fact, it is less mischievous than that. The intelligence-gatherers work for a company, Genscape, that sells the information to traders everywhere, giving them a few days'jump before storage surveys are published by the government.