"Oil price war spurs biggest drop in import prices in three years and slams U.S. energy industry"

From MarketWatch:

U.S. import prices sink 2.3% in March and likely to keep falling 

The numbers: A price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia drove the cost of oil sharply lower in March and triggered the biggest decline in U.S. import prices in more than three years, delivering a big blow to American energy producers even before the coronavirus pandemic added to their woes.

The price index for U.S. imports sank 2.3% last month to mark the largest drop since early 2015 — the last time falling oil prices hurt the energy industry.
Excluding energy, import prices were flat.

What happened: The cost of imported oil slumped a whopping 27%, reflecting the biggest drop since November 2008 during the global financial panic. Prices had also fallen 9% in February.

Russia and Saudi Arabia have flooded the global energy market with oil after disagreeing on production limits. The dispute has sent oil prices tumbling.
The cost of West Texas intermediate crude CL.1, -2.95% stood at $21.33 a barrel in recent trades, about one-third of its price at the end of 2019. The last time it was that low was more than a decade ago during the Great Recession.

As a result, U.S. import prices have slid 4.1% in the past 12 months, the sharpest pullback in almost four years.

Import prices were flat minus fuel, but it’s unlikely to stay that way. The pandemic has severely disrupted international trade, for one thing, and declining economic activity will probably force many suppliers to cut prices in order to attract buyers.....MUCH MORE

As noted in the intro to "Crisis Chronicles: The Long Depression and the Panic of 1873":

This is what we would like to avoid.
For 24 years, until shaking off the 1893 panic, the world experienced a general decline in prices, the so-called "good deflation", accompanied by spasms of unemployment and enlivened by the inflationary gold rushes that expanded the money supply: South Africa, Deadwood, some of the later Australian strikes and culminating in the Klondike and Nome discoveries.
Combined with the price-reducing effects of the second industrial revolution it was a recipe for disruption....

From the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Liberty Street Economics blog, February 5, 2016

And the outro from Saturday's "Stocks will revisit their coronavirus crash low, and here’s when to expect it":

...What Mr. Hulbert is doing here is basic algorithmic trading stuff where you take past data and use it to try to shade the odds a little bit in your favor.
The next step up is some of the black box AI magic that attempts to tease out correlations that humans don't perceive.
The next step down from the algo stuff is to grab your calculator and add up all the stimulus monies, subtract all the economic losses and hope you have a positive number.
We aren't there yet. The measures taken so far are just liquidity pumps aimed at keeping the economy's head above water.
Stay tuned.