Here is another story behind the story via Shah Gilani, who has seen just about everything over the decades:
The real question then should be who were those speculators in USO?
There were plenty of U.S. investors speculating on the price of oil by buying USO. How many we don’t know.
What we do know is there were at least 60,000 Chinese “retail” investors playing the same game.
It hasn’t come out yet, and we may never know, whether contract selling by the USO managers, which had to rollover the April futures contracts they’d bought on behalf of USO shareholders on the last day of trading into May futures (the “rollover”) caused the implosion, or whether other futures sellers who were likewise “long” the contracts up to the last day and had to sell, and they were to blame.
More than likely, it was both. And more than likely it was mostly Chinese retail speculators who got burned.
Chinese mainlanders can’t buy USO, but they can buy Chinese “me too” products. And boy did they ever.
China’s big banks, and smaller ones too for that matter, create “wealth management products” for their depositors and any customers who want to buy them. There’s a whole, very long and sordid story to tell about wealth management products, and I’ll tackle that another time. Suffice it say, several giant banks created Yuan You Bao, or “crude oil treasure” products for their retail customers.
https://totalwealthresearch.com