I'm really having a hard time with the current market conditions. Ok, so the Saudis are acting to stop fracking, oil-shale exploitation and all of the other increases in production from non-OPEC countries. Again. Yay.
I get that low oil prices mean bad days for energy companies, many "emerging" countries, and the financial markets, to whom any news is bad news.
But in the "developed" countries, this makes literally everything else cheaper. In the short and medium term, yay. And when the Saudis have made their point, they'll drop production, prices will go back up, everything will return to normal, more or less.
The problem with that reasoning is that there's no fundamental law of nature that dictactes what "normal" means; instead there is a complex network of interrelated forces that is itself kind of resilient but whose individual states are very fragile. Under those conditions, it is practically imposible to "go back" after having disrupted the status quo.
On the one hand, there is such thing as supply destruction, oil producers that are marginally profitable and that go out of business if price collapses, taking tons of hard capital (not financial, but equipment, personnel know how, etc). The Saudis are pressumably aware of this and very much doing it on purpose.
The problem is that there also exist demand destruction. Companies that consume energy in large quantities to produce economically useful but expensive goods and services. This guys conversely go out of business when oil price spikes (there was some statistic going around in 2008 about how 5 out of the last 6 recesions in the US where correlated with high energy prices), which is the intended effect of Saudi strategy.
So, eventually, when the noise signal introduced in oil prices gets absorbed by the market negative feedback loops, the economy we go back to will likely be smaller than the economy we started with. We could debate wether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but many actors are nervous because this is a game of musical chairs, and very few can say they will have a guarrantied place at the table by the time the rubble stops bouncing.
Parts of North Dakota are a good example of the impact of the fluctuating oil markets. They experienced an economic boom, with more jobs than manpower which spurred an influx of people, new housing development, and growth in the local economies. Now that the price of oil has collapsed, it's left towns in financial despair:
> On the one hand, there is such thing as supply destruction, oil producers that are marginally profitable and that go out of business if price collapses, taking tons of hard capital (not financial, but equipment, personnel know how, etc). The Saudis are pressumably aware of this and very much doing it on purpose.
Doesn't that equipment get sold? If not immediately, then eventually, modulo the odd pipe that gets bent or rusted in storage.
And those people are largely available for the jobs they're experienced at when jobs are available, so they aren't "destroyed" either, they're just idled. Some will move on, some won't.
> Doesn't that equipment get sold? If not immediately, then eventually, modulo the odd pipe that gets bent or rusted in storage.
A lot of it, no. A lot of equipment is built on site and would have to be destructively disassembled to be moved, but just leaving it there without using or maintaining it will cause it to rust or be damaged by the elements. And even the equipment that can be resold and still physically exists would have to be transported back to the site at significant expense. A lot of the sites are in remote locations.
> And those people are largely available for the jobs they're experienced at when jobs are available, so they aren't "destroyed" either, they're just idled. Some will move on, some won't.
The "some will move on" being the trouble. You have somebody who knows how to do a specific thing not many people know how to do, you lay them off and they go find some other job doing something else that pays about as well, move house, put their kids into new schools, now you want them back. Good luck with that.
Assests are not abstract. They are deployed to one particular site, and a big part of the cost goes to install them in that site. That's why all producers are basically operating at a cost right now.
You may reopen a closed oil ring (assuming you did nothing destructive to maximize your short term wins, which fraking companies are, AFAIK).
The personnel question is a tricky one. People need to eat, so if they face a downturn, many will be discouraged and move to different careers. Some will return, if the market picks up enough to pay way above average wages, but some just definitively won't. You will have to make up the difference by training a fresh crop of young crew members.
And I find it amusing to see that a subset of the HN audience can have such a hard time to grasp that other industries might have their own talent acquisition problems.
Is there any evidence that anyone is actually worried, or is it just people worrying that other people might be worried?
I mean, the markets are down, but that's just a "quickly grab a chair now that the music's stopped" situation isn't it? Or alternatively, regression to the mean?
Someone please correct me if I'm grossly misunderstanding here. As you may be able to tell I'm no expert, to put it mildly.
The Saudis tried petro-power politics by driving prices up through cutting production, but other OPEC members immediately increased production for the additional lucrative revenue.
OPEC has been dead for a while -- why? It was a cartel that survived on the basis of raising and lowering production in unison, and now it is a race to the bottom. The Saudis were betrayed and this is their revenge.
The oil flood is as much about punishing other OPEC members as it is about killing potential Iranian oil revenue.
Or, the Saudis realized that they make more money in the long term with price swings than a steady increase.
At 100$/barrel people would just switch to something else. At 100-40-120-60-200, people are going to keep buying low mileage gas powered cars in massive numbers, building car infrastructure, and living in the suburbs.
PS: Don't forget you can manufacture oil for
~100$ per barrel, but if your factory folds when prices drop under 90$ it's a poor bet at those prices. It takes huge investments to create an alternative over decades, but you can kill them off with a few lean years.
The $100 dollar barrel was a huge mistake, if the price was engineered through cartel maneuvers. It launched shale oil but, much more importantly, it made solar cheaper one decade ahead of time.
The solar energy cat is out of the bag[1], it will forever loom over oil.
Depends on why oil prices are low. If aggregate demand has dropped then it means another recession may be coming. If it is simply an over supply, then you're right. Everything I have read says over supply, but people are worried that China is really slowing down and the numbers are cooked to hide that fact.
So while high oil prices seem bad, they indicate huge demand and high economic activity.
The worst case is that various oil-exporting states find they suddenly have a huge budget hole and are forced into cutting the social programs which hold them together, resulting in riots and civil wars. Russia, Iraq, and Nigeria are obvious risks here. Potentially the proxy war between KSA and Iran might turn into an actual war between those two countries.
I keep forgetting about Russia. :-) It's a relatively new player and their production is currently as high as Saudi Arabia, although their reserves are smaller.
There has also been a large 'forced' sell off of equities from sovereign wealth funds, due to the decrease in oil prices, so they can keep their country operations going. That impacted US company stock prices which might otherwise benefit from lower oil prices.
It is the massive liquidation of sovereign wealth funds that is causing markets to move lower. When someone is forced to sell, what happens to the price? It tanks. There is no floor. Technicals take over. This coupled with expected negative earnings outlook creates a vicious cycle of downward trajectory.
"This coupled with expected negative earnings outlook creates a vicious cycle of downward trajectory."
That's kinda my point: what negative earnings outlook? Lower oil prices means lower costs for every industry but energy. "Developed" markets are mostly oil-importers, and are still (as far as I know) the source of most industries' profits.
Surely this will give an increased incentive to countries divest from oil completely in order to ensure long term economic stability. Take Singapore for example. Oil is cheap for them now which is good from an import perspective but they are also invested in oil with something like 6% of their sovereign fund which is not so good. They also have an abundance of sunshine. It makes perfect sense for them to use this as a catalyst for transitioning to renewables even though in the short term oil is cheap to import.
Are you assuming that developed countries are net energy importers, and developing countries exporters? The U.S. is close to coming into balance, thanks to fracking. Plus, some large profits from oil come to the U.S. when prices are high, because many oil companies are based in the U.S.
A net-petro-exporter USA is still a USA the economy of which is mostly not based on resource extraction. That's why the USA dollar has appreciated against those of e.g. Canada or Australia.
1) The drop in prices could be a signal that people aren't creating stuff which could be a slow down in growth,
2) It's difficult to quantify the impact the oil and gas boom had as a percentage of global GDP growth and therefore what the impact will be in its absence.
I get the "leveraged up the wazoo" part, it's unpleasant when someone defaults on debt that you hold. To match 2008 however, the pile of debt ought to be large enough and the risk has to be mispriced. (Those who hold junk bonds expect defaults and so hold a large bunch of such bonds hoping that only some will be defaulted on, and they also hold other assets. That plus the high yield of the bond before it defaulted should make things smoother.)
The deflationary spiral bit I do not get. By itself, a cheaper resource should increase consumption because now everything is cheaper and you have as much money you can spend on stuff as you used to. Externalities aside, this kind of deflation is not what's called a "deflationary spiral", is it? A deflationary spiral is when consumption goes down because people don't have money to buy stuff, and then producers lower prices, profits fall, people are fired, consumption drops further, prices fall even lower, etc. But cheap resource availability is different, theoretically, because then consumption should rise instead of drop, not? (Also it'd be a bit strange if say finding large new deposits of some resource were a guaranteed economic disaster; one would think it should make things better.)
It can be spiral-like locally without it necessarily being so nationally or globally. Ask your average roughneck or metal bender in Texas or North Dakota about layoffs, salary cuts or personal spending trends and you'll find all of the spiral characteristics.
Yes, this is not obviously deflationary. Especially when it's a resource that contributes to market inefficiency, like transportation costs. If it becomes cheaper to move things from A to B, then price differentials between A and B become harder to sustain. (that can contribute both to price falls as well as price increases - if it costs less to export something to a foreign market, domestic consumers might have to pay suppliers MORE to persuade them to sell the item locally rather than ship it overseas).
There's a major difference from 2008: one well crashing and closing increases the price of oil, while one mortgage being defaulted on decreases the value of houses.
> But in the "developed" countries, this makes literally everything else cheaper
Not necessarily. Take a look at Canada. With the Canadian dollar tanking, the price of everything imported is going up (because it's imported from the US and the USD-CAD exchange rate is lopsided).
Maybe what you really mean by "developed" countries is "just for people in the US."
> Ok, so the Saudis are acting to stop fracking, oil-shale exploitation
> And when the Saudis have made their point, they'll drop production, prices will go back up, everything will return to normal, more or less.
Something will happen, but I think the cat's out of the bag: Even if prices rise significantly, the US has proven to itself that it is/came become very quickly self supplying in oil. This significantly decreases the Saudi's leverage in world politics which changes some balances in the middle east and beyond quite significantly.
Similar things are true for Europe (especially in the east) with regard to Russia. Russia's medium-sized stick has been the threat to cut off gas to its western neighbours, and it gets really cold there in the winter.
>in the "developed" countries, this makes literally everything else cheaper
LOL. In Canada, the drop of oil prices dropped the loonie, and now grocery prices are through the freaking roof. It's harder to eat healthy when a cauliflower is $13.
They're worried for several reasons. The biggest is, what if it isn't dropping because of the Saudis, but because of a weak economy in China? And what if that spreads to the rest of the world?
Additionally, the lower oil prices wrecked the income of a number of state and national governments that just assumed the price would stay that way for the foreseeable future.
> And when the Saudis have made their point, they'll drop production, prices will go back up, everything will return to normal, more or less.
When Saudis drop production, they stop acting against fracking. In that case, normal means about $60-$70 per barrel. It's the point where fracking starts making financial sense.
I suspect, the oil money, was going to Saudis and then coming back. Making the economy run more. I've been to the middle-east a few times: Construction, Cars, Yachts, Electronics... were all financed by oil.
Right at the moment, markets are quite scared. Anything different means "run for the exits, then evaluate it, then get back in cautiously if I decide that it wasn't bad after all". Everybody has 2008 on the brain; they don't want to be caught holding the bag if everything falls apart again.
Saudi oil production is higher than it has been since the late '70s. Which means to me that they're driving supply well above any kind of stable point. Certainly, they're taking an economic hit from it. Which they have done before to drive other suppliers into line.
The Saudis are not so much chasing hares as cockroaches.
If all of those countries which are currently dependent on bringing in oil money (Russia et al) are destabilized politically and financially then we all suffer. Plus if the Saudis survive and knock off all of the other competitors the price will go through the roof and then where are we?
USA have basically been daring Russia to make us suffer for decades now. If they had it in them I guess we would have suffered already. It turns out that suffering is mostly an export for us.
The Saudis will certainly "survive". They might put many other production areas out of business in the short term, and that is bad for current investors. It's good for alternate fuels, however, and it only keeps other areas out of production for as long as the price stays down. The internal contradictions of the Saudi state will eventually dictate a price rise...
I get that low oil prices mean bad days for energy companies, many "emerging" countries, and the financial markets, to whom any news is bad news.
But in the "developed" countries, this makes literally everything else cheaper. In the short and medium term, yay. And when the Saudis have made their point, they'll drop production, prices will go back up, everything will return to normal, more or less.
So why is everyone worried?