The coronavirus pandemic has caused a series of mind-bending distortions across world financial markets, but Monday featured the most bizarre one yet: The benchmark price for crude oil in the United States fell to negative $37.63.

That means that if you happened to be in a position to take delivery of 1,000 barrels of oil in Cushing, Okla., in the month of May — the quantity quoted in the relevant futures contract — you could have been paid a cool $37,630 to do so. (That is about five tanker trucks’ worth, so any joke about storing the oil in your basement will have to remain just that.)

There are two ways of looking at this. First is what happened in a technical sense. The collapse of the May futures contract for West Texas Intermediate crude oil shows how the shock of the crisis is rippling through all sorts of markets and making them behave strangely.

But the broader takeaway is that the Covid-19 crisis is an extraordinary deflationary shock to the economy, causing the idling of a vast share of the world’s productive resources. Don’t let shortages of a few goods, like face masks or toilet paper, confuse the matter. The consequences will almost surely persist beyond the period of widespread lockdowns.