Brent settled around $94.06 and WTI (West Texas Intermediate) near $90.51 late on Friday 29 May, a spread of about $3.551, out from the $2-3 band the May Iran memorandum had compressed it into. NYMEX WTI non-commercial positions had run to a +172,580 net long by 19 May, with managed money at +98,219; that length is now bleeding out, and WTI falls faster than Brent as the unwind progresses. Managed money cut WTI net length to +79,924 by 26 May, and that unwinding drove the spread, with no matching move in crude supply or demand.
The re-widening bites hardest on freight. At $3.50-plus the TC2 route (the transatlantic clean-products freight benchmark for gasoline and naphtha out of Northwest Europe) sees its arb tighten, because US barrels have less incentive to cross the Atlantic once the crude spread moves against them. With Chinese lifting absent and Atlantic-basin light-sweet grades staying West, European EBOB (the Northwest European gasoline barge benchmark) faces less competition from US exports.
The arb shuts from two directions at once: the crude spread pushes US barrels home, and the absent Eastern bid keeps Atlantic crude in the basin. European refiners gain on the product side what they lose on tighter feedstock economics. The detailed US gasoline-balance print underneath this spread is the demand evidence, and it sits in its own EIA reading.
