The price of a barrel of the North American oil benchmark came within a few cents of eclipsing the lowest point it ever got to during the devastating recession of 2009.
West Texas Intermediate was changing hands at $34.39 US a barrel nearing midday on Monday, down about one per cent on the day. Earlier in the session, WTI bounced as low as $34.
That's just two cents off the lowest closing price that oil hit during the financial crisis, which was $33.98 a barrel in February 2009.
Europe's standard oil blend, known as Brent, actually went lower than its lowest point of the recession, and is currently trading lower than it's been since July 2004, down 69 cents, or 1.9 per cent, to $36.18 a barrel.
"Really, I wouldn't like to be in the shoes of an oil exporter getting into 2016. It's not exactly looking as if there is light at the end of the tunnel any time soon," Saxo Bank senior manager Ole Hansen said.
So how low can it go?
"Pick your number," said Robert Mark, the chairman of investment policy at MacDougall, MacDougall & MacTier in Toronto. "It doesn't matter once you get past a certain level."
Oil is currently trading below what Mark calls the "marginal cost of supply" for many producers, so how much lower it can go is anyone's guess. Goldman Sachs made headlines last week for forecasting a WTI as low as $20 a barrel in 2016, but other analysts have said oil is close to troughing as we are already seeing a rebound in demand.
"It's not a magic number," Mark said, adding his firm doesn't get into the game of speculating on a floor price.
"But typically the lower the price goes, the more quick the rebound will be," he said.
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