Featured A seller has a tanker full of crude

Thanks to the magic of our bankruptcy laws, many of them won't have to make up their losses. They can file for bankruptcy, go to court, reorganize, and dismiss the debt.

Yes, somebody -- commonly big investors / banks / hedge funds / uber-wealthy individuals, not just oil folk -- loses shiploads of money, and some will be totally ruined.

But somebody -- else or not -- still ends up with all that oilfield and transport and refining hardware. It isn't chopped up for scrap. Whoever ends up with it, now detached from its former old debt load, can then look for new suckers investors to start it up again when prices improve, and start harvesting profits all over again, without having to make up any of those previous losses.

The Saudis learned this the hard way a half decade ago, when they succeeded in pushing a big block of our oil industry into bankruptcy, only to find that equipment pumping again when good prices resumed.

This works in other businesses too, where it is possible for the most shrewd and crafty of real estate schemers to serially bankrupt oneself all the way to the very tip-top. But that is a topic for a different sandbox ...

 

It might be different this time. In the five years since, it has become more obvious that fracked wells have short productive lives, and you have to keep drilling new ones to keep production even steady. Investment was starting to slack off because of that, and investors shifting from fossil fuels in general, before this crisis

 

Exactly...fracking has turned the once beautiful North Dakota prairies into a frack pad network. It is absolutely fracking horrifying. You can bring up google maps and see it. Similar story in parts of Colorado, etc...

 

I thought the title was the beginning of a joke. A seller has a tankful of crude and he walks into a bar...…..

 

The barkeeper buys it, sells the two tankers of crude, and uses the proceeds to buy three more.