Can Shale Come Back from the Brink?
From Oilprice.com:
A flurry of coverage about the gloom and outright calamity in the shale oil business appeared last week. Low prices continue to dog the industry. But so does lack of investor interest in financing loss-making operations for yet another season. Plunging stock prices portend more bankruptcies if circumstances don't change.
I received considerable pushback last January when I asked whether U.S. shale oil had entered a death spiral. The almost constant refrain of the cheerleaders for the shale oil industry has been that increasing production demonstrates there is something wrong with my analysis and that of others who have been skeptical of the industry's claims.
We skeptics have certainly been wrong about how long the boom could go on. We could not fathom why investors kept funneling capital into businesses that were consistently consuming it with no hope of ever providing a long-term return.
I can remember when Alan Greenspan, the former U.S. Federal Reserve Bank chair, opined in December 1996 about "irrational exuberance" in the U.S. stock market. His speech turned out to be only an inflection point for the technology sector boom. The tech-heavy NASDAQ stock exchange rose 288 percent between the day Greenspan spoke and the index's peak in March 2000.
In the subsequent bust the bankruptcy courts were littered with companies that had never made dime.Click here to read more.
