Put simply, shale and “fracking” are only economic stateside insofar as oil is nominally very expensive. Translated, the dollar isn’t weak enough for fracking to be economic. Translated a second time, for fracking to make economic sense every other sector of the U.S. economy must endure the low-investment (meaning low growth) agony that is always and everywhere a consequence of a weak dollar. Which leads to a quiz of sorts: which were the two slowest growth, worst stock-market decades of the last 50 years? The easy answer is the ‘70s and ‘00s when the oil patch was thriving, but the rest of the U.S. economy was operating at a fraction of its potential. Weak dollar equals slow growth (investors are buying future income streams in dollars, get it?) because investment slows down.The article spends a lot of time on the Author's priors, then leads to this gem above.
You cannot really be a value added economy, like Japan, and an oil exporter, like the USA. The two economies will not scale. The anti-connection will be tightest if you currency is the global reserve as that will be the pricing currency for commodities.
Thus, the fracking industry need be liquid, it needs to turn off and on, act as the marginal inventory. And that makes dollar futures impossible, oil hedging will congest the currency futures market. Fama Puzzle.
The formula is: Comparative advantage plus Fama information model means Fama Puzzle. The trick is congestion. comparative advantage means an exporter has excess inventory and can respond to currency futures with a liquid delivery contract. Comparative advantage thus squeezing the currency futures liquidity. Interest charges on currency bets will rise rapidly to the occasion, extinguishing the trade. If trade ever reached equilibrium, currency futures would be unpredictable white noise.
Currency speculators, like Soros, are really betting the central banks get stuck when attempting to hold an arbitrage open. Sandbox theory, congestion, structured queues all over again, everywhere in economics. Forensic accounting is a good name here.
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