Aubrey McClendon

This story is wild.

For those unfamiliar, Aubrey McClendon was riding high 10, 15 years ago. He was the founder of Chesapeake Energy, and was known as a pioneer of shale drilling. He was larger than life -- one year had a pay package of $112 million making him notorious for corporate largesse, except the stock was delivering 20 percent returns annualized. He was a billionaire and an almost larger-than-life figure in the world of natural gas.

A few years ago, things started to unravel. He was forced out at Chesapeake after it came out that he had borrowed a ton of money in personal loans from companies that were lenders to the company. It looked like a giant conflict of interest at best. The whole thing was sleazy. His spending habits, and his use of company resources for personal things came under scrutiny. It was an ugly split with a lawsuit over him stealing company data on available land on his way out. He generally came off as sleazy and reckless with money.

He had kind of disappeared from sight. ... until yesterday the Justice Department indicted him for allegedly rigging the bidding process on certain oil and gas leases in Oklahoma over several years. It put his name back in the news this morning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/b...racy-in-oil-and-natural-gas-bidding.html?_r=0

I figured that was that. But then, just a few minutes ago. ... I read that he had crashed his car and killed himself today. He pretty much drove himself straight into a wall -- literally and figuratively.

Ex-Chesapeake CEO McClendon dies in car wreck

 

That has more to do with the fact that it is massively in debt and its profits have fallen off a cliff. All things that happened post McClendon. It has been ridiculously cheap to borrow with what the Federal Reserve created with QE and interest-rate suppression and the mispricing of risk that created. Chesapeake loaded itself up with cheap debt and kept expanding into harder-to-drill-in-areas -- as did its competitors. The market couldn't price the risk properly because of the Fed.

All of that created supply gluts in oil and gas. It all worked as long as demand remained strong and the prices of oil and gas remained high. But the opposite has happened. The global economy is slow, demand has been weak globally, and there is way too much supply. They can't make money drilling at these prices -- particularly in the harder-to-drill areas they expanded into. At the same time, the world started coming to its senses and high-yield debt started to reprice as people started realizing the Fed lost control this year. Which has left Chesapeake scrambling to service what is a massive amount of debt.

A few dozen of their competitors have already declared bankruptcy and Chesapeake is on its last breath -- selling everything that isn't nailed down and trying to conserve cash. About a month ago, the stock crashed on reports that they had retained bankruptcy lawyers, and honestly, it would be the easiest path for the company. But to management's credit (which hasn't included McClendon in years), they have been doing everything they can to avoid a bankruptcy. They may not have a choice at some point.