: the ongoing crash in oil prices which threatens to not only leave millions of Texans unemployed indefinitely - and not just for 1-2 months as a result of the coronavirus pandemic - but unleash unprecedented defaults among US shale firms most of which are financed by junk bonds which will never be rolled over if current conditions persist.

One person who has not forgotten, however, is Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, who held a phone call with the de facto leader of OPEC, or at least what's left of it, Saudi crown prince MbS, in which the two discussed "the need to maintain stability in global energy markets" in what Bloomberg said amounted to "the U.S.'s most direct intervention in the price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia."

"The secretary stressed that as a leader of the G20 and an important energy leader, Saudi Arabia has a real opportunity to rise to the occasion and reassure global energy and financial markets when the world faces serious economic uncertainty," the State Department said on Wednesday.

Predictably, the two leaders also discussed their "deep concern" about the coronavirus outbreak and the need to contain the pandemic, which we can only imagine is code for something much more sinister, especially with Iran coronavirus cases now above 27K and virtually none in Saudi Arabia.