The fracking industry relies on negative interest rates to convince investors that they will lose money slower than just holding cash, says Max Keiser of RT’s Keiser Report.
He spoke to the director of Public Citizen’s energy program Tyson Slocum about the structural failures in the energy market which allowed for a negative oil price.
“The US fracking industry, which has had structural financial problems for a very long time, was left completely exposed by the chain of events surrounding Covid-19,” Slocum said, adding that the “entire business model has been exposed to be a complete sham.”
As an example, Slocum spoke about one leading CEO of a major fracking company, which has a big presence in the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico. The CEO told Texas regulators when they “very briefly flirted with the idea of imposing production limits on Texas producers… that the problem is not Russia or Saudi Arabia, it’s us. We have done a poor job with investors’ capital; we’ve wasted it, and until we start fixing our problems nothing is going to save us.”
According to Slocum, “the problem is that I don’t see anything fixing fracking’s structural financial problems at any time. It’s a losing proposition and, hopefully, we’ve got a growing number of policymakers that now finally recognize that fracking is not going to be the engine that is going to be able to drive the US economy.”
In fact, it’s one of the big shams that’s actually holding parts of the United States back, he said.
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