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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that the change was to allow the stimulus loans to be used to pay off and refinance loans they currently have as well as claim back past losses on taxes.

While questionable in many ways, why is that specific to the oil and gas industry other than them having many past profits?

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Because they were already over leveraged businesses that shouldn't have been given access to stimulus capital. This is exactly the problem causing "zombie companies" [1], companies that are only able to survive with cheap capital (similar to the VC model funding business models that are never going to be profitable at any scale).

And of all companies to provide stimulus for, oil and gas is not what we should be wasting even more fiat on. This is a handout, plain and simple, no different than the governor of North Dakota trying to prop up a coal plant that hasn't been profitable in years that the owners themselves want to shut down [2] [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_company

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/11/north-dakotas-largest-power-...

[3] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/north-dakota-governor-oppos...

Around here the frackers are starting to abandon wells and hollow out as much cash from the companies as possible before bankruptcy, and now those sites are active pollution and safety hazards that the taxpayer will be responsible for.

I hope all the poor brown and black kids that live around here don't hop the fences to the drill sites and get hurt somehow, but I know it's just a matter of time.

This is the third time this has happened in my specific city in the past hundred years. Two major oil busts, and now the fracking collapse.

Everyone always gets to keep their bonuses. Nobody ever goes to jail.

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