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Furthermore, our imports are increasingly from friendly countries. Canadian exports to the U.
In fact, total trade in goods between the U. While Iran is of no economic value to the U. The recent rally in crude is in part attributed to fears of less Iranian crude on the global market — they currently produce 3. Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin was reported to have discussed with U.
The Federal government was of little help to the industry during the oil price collapse, and has limited near term ability to influence production levels. Rising prices and falling break-evens are improving profitability, driving output to Just a year ago, the U.
They now expect to average Although growing strongly, U. OPEC is showing surprising discipline in sticking to their supply agreement. Differentials are far in excess of the cost of pipeline transport, because pipelines leaving the Permian in west Texas are full. There are reports that the rail network is clogged with trainloads of fracking sand entering the region, while trucks and truckers are in short supply. Although the logistical challenges offer profit opportunities for the owners of energy infrastructure, in the near term crude output growth may be constrained.
In other words, insufficient pipeline capacity is in part down to the earlier reluctance of producers to commit, which discouraged the development of infrastructure that would have been in use today. Smaller firms, often privately owned, are more vulnerable than large ones. PXD has firm transportation contracts in place for their increasing production of oil and gas, a point they highlighted in their recent earnings presentation. When capital was available and customer commitments forthcoming, new infrastructure was built. Oil producers have surprised many, including themselves, at the volume growth efficiencies have made possible.
Thanks to the Shale Revolution, U. Last week was a busy week of earnings reports for many sectors, including energy infrastructure. Growing energy sector profitability is feeding through to higher returns to investors. That was a significant beat for such a large, stable business as every segment did better than expected. On the call , CEO Jim Teague highlighted the value of midstream companies in getting product to the global market. They are the leader in providing gathering and processing in the Permian Basin, but even more interesting was the volume growth they saw elsewhere, in North Dakota and South Texas.
Record earnings and volumes were reported by a good number of names. Surging demand for U. Higher crude prices are also improving the competitive position of U. Energy infrastructure businesses do better when their customers are thriving. Growing oil and gas production is creating tightness in some of the support functions. The losers are oil producers without contracted pipeline take-away capacity.
They benefit from the support of their peers who underwrote the infrastructure development. Plains All American PAA will announce earnings on Tuesday, and as the biggest crude oil pipeline operator in the Permian, their comments on demand for takeaway capacity will be especially interesting.
Not everything was good. The recent FERC ruling was the cause. Their Analyst Day later this month is expected to offer an update. Although MLPs retain an important tax advantage over corporate ownership of energy infrastructure assets, the several dozen distribution cuts by MLPs since , as well as unwelcome simplification transactions, have clearly soured their traditional investor base.
MLPs are evolving towards more internally-financed growth, which is for now impeding distribution growth. Check us out on CNBC at 4pm. Although the prospects for U. The FERC ruling is potentially a long run problem for some businesses. While initially limited to certain interstate natural gas pipelines, it will in time also apply to other liquids lines. Tax-deferred, stable, high yields uncorrelated with commodity prices attracted many. The re-emergence of the U. Before the Shale Revolution, we consumed roughly the same quantities of energy from the same parts of the country every year.
The need for new infrastructure was limited. They chose to pursue their backlog of growth projects rather than maintain payouts. This maintained the dividends paid by the parent which also gained a tax shield, but as with Kinder Morgan, their MLP unitholders saw distributions cut in a taxable transaction. An MLP investor base that had been promised stable and tax deferred income got neither. One consequence of reducing payouts has been the alienation of the traditional MLP investor: The covenant of stable distributions has been broken.
MLP managements are speaking out. MLPs are converting to corporations because the MLP structure has turned out to be a poor source of growth capital. In when sector returns were very good, taxes and other expenses ate up a third of returns for some funds, and on top of that holders still faced their own investment tax bill. Moreover, we know from many, regular conversations that few financial advisors using such vehicles appreciate the tax drag their fund choice incurs.
The sharp drop on March 15 th following the FERC ruling betrayed the narrowness of the investor base. However, MLPs are certainly not going to disappear entirely. Their owners can continue to enjoy the tax efficiencies, which include no corporate tax and deferral of income tax on the majority of distributions.
But for most companies, the point of a public listing is access to capital. Traditional income seeking investors and tax-burdened MLP-dedicated funds are the two main investor groups — not a very reliable set of buyers on which a CFO might rely. But holders of tax-burdened, MLP-dedicated funds have an additional risk to consider as MLPs incorporate, and they could use some advice. In addition, the Fewer names will either lead to more concentrated portfolios of less liquid securities or a highly disruptive shift to a broader index.
Restricting your energy infrastructure investments to MLP-dedicated funds might be too narrow. Like the disappearing Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, you may be left to contemplate just a smile. So the recent rally in the sector has led many investors to enquire why. Although the dividend hike was expected, the stock nonetheless gained ground.
Shale Revolution-induced growth opportunities pursued by management collided with the desire of income-seeking investors for steadily growing cashflows see Will MLP Distribution Cuts Pay Off? An adverse tax outcome and two distribution cuts followed for original investors in Kinder Morgan Partners. Nonetheless, the persistent high yields on MLPs betray the skepticism of their traditional investor base of older, wealthy Americans. One friend of mine held its predecessor Northern Border Partners from the s, and received an unexpected tax bill on deferred income recapture that was timed to suit OKE, not him.
Such investors are not about to commit new money to MLPs. This is the problem facing MLPs but not corporations. This is why investors need to look for broad energy infrastructure exposure including corporations, and not be limited to MLPs see The American Energy Independence Index. Technical analysts have noted that energy infrastructure shows signs of bottoming, something not heard since Energy stocks are gaining more airtime on CNBC.
The article included a chart reproduced here that is a true object of beauty to any pipeline owner. The problem of sharply growing crude oil production in the Permian is testing the limits of take-away pipeline capacity.
Permian output is currently 3. The price differential has widened beyond the pipeline tariff because not all the crude wishing to travel to Houston can get in a pipeline. This is a problem for Permian oil producers, since the increased cost of getting their product to market eats into margins. Bottlenecks are good for infrastructure owners. They make money from regional price differentials in excess of the costs of storage and transportation. When Plains All American PAGP cut their distribution last year, they blamed it on a collapse in their Supply and Logistics division as regional price differentials were boringly close to transportation costs, minimizing arbitrage opportunities.
Some additional pipeline capacity can be squeezed out through more efficient utilization. Drag reducing agents millions of tiny polymer string segments can be mixed with crude which, through the magic of hydrodynamics, reduce turbulence as the liquid travels. The theme of our discussions was: How has the Shale Revolution changed your business? Behind the miserable recent performance of energy infrastructure securities lies the most fantastic American success story.
Shale industry and failed, because the American capitalist system showed its flexibility. This served to standardize the coercive arrest Pressionshaft , and got rid of the many arbitrary sanctions that were not universal. In most of the cities, the towers and city fortifications functioned as jails. For certain sanctions there were designated prisons, hence some towers being called debtors' prison Schuldturm.
Sometimes it was used as a tool to compel payment, other times it was used to secure the arrest of an individual and ensure a trial against them in order to garnish wages, replevin or a form of trover. It was more similar to the modern enforcement of sentences Strafvollzug e. The North German Confederation eliminated debtors' prisons on May 29, At present a comparable concept to debtors' prison still exists in various forms in Germany: In England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 10, people were imprisoned for debt each year. With a little money, a debtor could pay for some freedoms; some prisons allowed inmates to conduct business and to receive visitors; others including the Fleet and King's Bench Prisons even allowed inmates to live a short distance outside the prison—a practice known as the 'Liberty of the Rules'—and the Fleet even tolerated clandestine ' Fleet Marriages '.
Life in these prisons, however, was far from pleasant, and the inmates were forced to pay for their keep. Samuel Byrom, son of the writer and poet John Byrom , was imprisoned for debt in the Fleet in , and in he sent a petition to his old school friend, the Duke of Dorset , in which he raged against the injustices of the system.
Some debtor prisoners were even less fortunate, being sent to prisons with a mixture of vicious criminals and petty criminals, and many more were confined to a single cell. The father of the English author Charles Dickens was sent to one of these prisons the Marshalsea , which were often described in Dickens's novels.
The Debtors' Act of limited the ability of the courts to sentence debtors to prison, but it did not entirely prohibit them from doing so. Debtors who had the means to pay their debt, but did not do so, could still be incarcerated for up to six weeks, as could those who defaulted on debts to the court. By , the total number of debtors imprisoned decreased by almost 2,, dropping from 9, in to 6, in The most famous was the Clink prison , which had a debtor's entrance in Stoney Street.
This prison gave rise to the British slang term for being incarcerated in any prison, hence "in the clink". Its location also gave rise to the term for being financially embarrassed, "stoney broke". An eighteenth century debtors' prison is found within the Castellania in Valletta , Malta, now used as offices by the Ministry for Health. It remained in use as a prison until the nineteenth century. People who fail to pay their debts today are given prison sentences to be served at Corradino Prison in Paola.
Debtors in the United Arab Emirates , including Dubai , are imprisoned for failing to pay their debts. This is a common practice in the country. Banks are not sympathetic to the debtors once they are in prison, so many just choose to leave the country where they can negotiate for settlements later. The practice of fleeing UAE to avoid arrest because of debt defaults is considered a viable option to customers who are unable to meet their obligations.
Many Colonial American jurisdictions established debtors' prisons using the same models used in Great Britain. James Wilson , a signatory to the Declaration of Independence , spent some time in a debtors' prison while still serving as an Associate Justice of the U.
Lee, was imprisoned for debt between and [23] where he made use of his time by writing "Memoirs of the War".
Debtors' prisons were prevalent throughout the United States up until the mids. Economic hardships following the War of with Great Britain helped swell prison populations with simple debtors. This resulted in significant attention being given to plights of the poor and most dependent jailed under the widespread practice, possibly for the first time. The United States ostensibly eliminated the imprisonment of debtors under federal law in [28] [29] leaving the practice of debtors' prisons to states.
While the United States no longer has brick and mortar debtors' prisons, or "gaols for debtors" of private debts, the term "debtor's prison" in modern times sometimes refers to the practice of imprisoning indigent criminal defendants for matters related to either a fine or a fee imposed in criminal judgments. Supreme Court, [5] [34] and passage of the Bankruptcy Reform Act of In , the Court ruled in Williams v. Illinois that extending a maximum prison term because a person is too poor to pay fines or court costs violates the right to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Short , the Court found it unconstitutional to impose a fine as a sentence and then automatically convert it into "a jail term solely because the defendant is indigent and cannot forthwith pay the fine in full. Georgia , the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment bars courts from revoking probation for a failure to pay a fine without first inquiring into a person's ability to pay and considering whether there are adequate alternatives to imprisonment.
Plains All American PAA will announce earnings on Tuesday, and as the biggest crude oil pipeline operator in the Permian, their comments on demand for takeaway capacity will be especially interesting. They now expect to average Retrieved 6 December The North German Confederation eliminated debtors' prisons on May 29, One investor we spoke to last week found this sufficient reason to exit his remaining tax-burdened MLP funds in favor of a more efficient, RIC-compliant structure. An eighteenth century debtors' prison is found within the Castellania in Valletta , Malta, now used as offices by the Ministry for Health.
A year-long study released in of fifteen states with the highest prison populations [38] by the Brennan Center for Justice , found that all fifteen states sampled have jurisdictions that arrest people for failing to pay debt or appear at debt related hearings. In an article in The American Conservative , Michael Shindler argues that another factor responsible for debtors' prison type arrests is that "Whereas indigent defendants have a Sixth Amendment right to a court-appointed lawyer in criminal cases involving incarceration, indigent debtors in state and local courts have no one to defend them against the error and abuse that characterizes debt collection litigation.
In , National Public Radio NPR posted a report stating that there were still cases of judges imprisoning people who have not paid court fees. In September, , the town of Bowdon, Georgia made international news [50] when a sitting municipal judge, Robert A. Diment, was surreptitiously recorded threatening defendants with jail time for traffic violations if they did not provide immediate payment. This international treaty contradicts many domestic laws of ratified states which allows for civil jail.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Imprisonment for debt Upper Canada.
The New York Times. The Tampa Bay Times. Archived from the original on 6 July American Journal of Legal History. Archived from the original on December 12, The National Archives UK. Retrieved 6 December Great Britain Home Office. Archived from the original on The Real History of the American Revolution. Washington and Lee University. Stanley Joslin January The Brennan Center for Justice.