US crude inventories fall 865,000 barrels last week, EIA says

The miss matters more than the direction: a draw that came in well short of both the Bloomberg consensus and the analyst forecast suggests the physical tightening many had positioned for is not arriving at the expected pace. That gap between expectations and the EIA print is the kind of surprise that feeds through to crude benchmarks and, by extension, to tokenized commodity and energy-linked RWA products that track them. Whether the smaller-than-forecast draw is a one-week quirk or the start of a softer stock trend is the open question, with the prior week's larger decline as the comparison point.