Never before has drilling for oil collapsed this far this fast.
The word “boom” can never be thought of as a stand-alone concept that everyone loves, particularly governments because they get to rake in the big bucks. It’s always attached to its miserable twin that no one wants to see, the “bust.” They come invariably in cycles, one after the other. You can’t have one without the other. It’s just a question of time. And in the world of fracking, it’s no different.
The fracking-for-oil boom started in 2005, collapsed by 60% during the Financial Crisis when money ran out, but got going in earnest after the Fed had begun spreading its newly created money around the land. From the trough in May 2009 to its peak in October 2014, rigs drilling for oil soared from 180 to 1,609: multiplied by a factor of 9 in five years! And oil production soared, to reach 9.2 million barrels a day in January.
That’s what real booms look like. They’re fed by limitless low-cost money – exuberant investors that buy the riskiest IPOs, junk bonds, leveraged loans, and CLOs usually indirectly without knowing it via their bond funds, stock funds, leveraged-loan funds, by being part of a public pension system that invests in private equity firms that invest in the boom…. You get the idea.
That’s how much of the American shale-oil revolution was funded.
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