A POV:
The recent fracking revolution — the United States has emerged as one of the world’s top oil producers in just the last few years — and the continuing story of American creativity has had an effect on the whole stock market. Americans can easily become emotional about that history of innovation.
Unfortunately, the bottom has just dropped out of that narrative, and some of us have gotten emotional about that, too. With this year’s extremely low oil prices, many of these frackers, so recently hailed as heroes, are going out of business. Their very ingenuity in increasing the supply of oil has been part of the problem by contributing to the oil price drop. It is easy to jump from this to broader conclusions: Maybe we’re not so smart after all, or so the new story goes. This thinking is a downer: Sometimes social narratives are quite depressing.