Are there any signs of this starting to happen given how low prices have gone?
However, those cash reserves will quickly burn though. And the worst part is a lot of Houston's economy is buttressed by oilfield services companies, which make all their money off drilling new fracking wells.
Right now, it makes 0 sense to drill new fracking wells (-40 sense, to be more accurate), and they have big loans on billions of dollars worth of equipment.
It's gonna hurt soon, and it's going to hurt very bad.
We're already starting to see some of this, but it's also getting swept up with the pandemic lockdown, so it's hard to tell one apart from the other ATM, except that oilfield services are shedding employees quicker than other large firms, anecdotally.
Edit: it's worth noting that while the last downturn was heavily impactful on the energy, manufacturing, and real estate sectors, the recovery was pretty quick as the overall impact to the economy was about 1.6% down, and the rest of the overall economy was booming.
Of course the automotive market in general is "non-typical" at the moment, so there are probably multiple interpretations to be made of whatever the market status is.
I recall seeing CBC news articles about all of the cars and trucks left abandoned in the parking lots of the Edmonton and Calgary airports. All of the out-of-province workers just split once the pickings became poor. Cheap Tacoma trucks for a year or two, I regret not picking one up off of Kijiji (aka Canadian Craigslist) while I had the chance...