Those fracking/oil shale companies were leveraged up the wazoo. Remember 2008?
>But in the "developed" countries, this makes literally everything else cheaper.
Yup. This has the potential to turn into a deflationary spiral.
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.)