Benchmarks must reflect regional fundamentals. But it is unreasonable to expect efficient and working benchmarks to be divorced from the wider global market. Oil trades in a highly interconnected world. Benchmarks that become sepa- rated from price trends risk losing relevance. The disconnec- tion of US crude benchmark WTI is an object lesson in what happens to markets that are unable to react to the inter- play of fundamentals in the world at large. Barriers to this responsiveness can be as much legislative as physical.
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