The debt involved in these bankruptcies in 2019 doubled from 2018 to $35 billion. This pushed the total debt listed in these bankruptcy filings since 2015 to $207 billion. The chart below shows the cumulative total debt involved in these bankruptcies since The debt involved in these bankruptcies in 2019 doubled from 2018 to $35 […]
And it’s brutal on investors at prevailing prices. The industry has been cash-flow negative from get-go. The high prices of oil and gas the industry needs to be cash-flow positive are being prevented by prolific shale oil and gas production. Executive compensation packages have been self-designed to reward richly any increases in production, hence no-matter-what […]
He did not pull any punches. “While hundreds of billions of dollars of benefits have accrued to hundreds of millions of people, the amount of shareholder value destruction registers in the hundreds of billions of dollars,” he said. “The industry is self-destructive.” https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Shale-Pioneer-Fracking-is-an-Unmitigated-Disaster.html
Time and again, despite the collapsed prices of oil and gas, the players in the shale revolution have gotten more funding from Wall Street, whose ZIRP-blinded clients kept gobbling up the newly issued junk bonds, leveraged loans, and shares, taking on huge risks and hoping to make a little extra money in a Fed-laid minefield where all decent assets are way overpriced……
Fracking is its own worst enemy.
I’m no Austrian but the concept of malinvestment would seem to apply to shale oil and gas if it applies to anything. It was produced by money illusion, faulty monetary policy and it will end as all booms do – in bust. The implications of that are greater than most people believe. Just as they thought sub-prime real estate loans would be contained so they believe that the fallout from the shale bust will be confined to the oil industry. I have serious doubts about that and you should too.
This winter, polar vortices blew across the land and hit the price of natural gas and sent it into dizzying spikes and plunges, aggravating head fakes, and whiplash-inducing turnarounds. But now the winter is petering out, and we’re left with a v…
Professor Walter Block may be the dean of libertarian thinkers and his yeoman work for the cause over the decades can’t be gainsaid. But when it comes to grasping the fraught political forces at large at the present historical juncture and the real significance of the 2020 election, the good professor is wearing some pretty […]
James Madison is surely smiling from his grave. Pursuant to his constitutional design, last night a badly divided electorate got an utterly gridlocked government—with the Supreme Court and Senate in the hands of one party and the House of Representatives and White House marginally in the hands of the other. That’s as good an RX […]
We are starting to get concerned about the personal well-being of some of the ace pundits on the Foxite Right, including Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, too. They are getting so hyperbolic—rabid even—about the dangers of a Biden victory that we fear they may split a spleen or something during the remaining 48 […]
