The world is awash in oil, there’s little demand for it and we’re running out of places to put it.

That, in a nutshell, explains Monday’s strange and unprecedented action in the market for crude oil futures contracts, where traders essentially offered to pay someone else to deal with the oil they were due to have delivered next month.

There’s little mystery as to why there’s so little demand for oil: Efforts to limit the spread of the coronavirus have major cities around the world on lockdown, air travel has been seriously curtailed, and millions of people are working from home, leading to far fewer commuters on the roads.

Read the answers to the FAQs birthed from the oil situation here.