Is Drilling Just Digging Investors Deeper?

No this is not about politics. A while ago, we argued that, facing weak demand and no shortage of supply, oil companies should not put their resources into producing more oil. The industry has an abominably bad record of investing in a way that does not benefit its owners, so why not just give the money back to them in the form of dividends instead of throwing it into holes in the ground? We didn’t get a lot of fan letters for that piece. Plus, right after we aired our opinion, both ExxonMobil and Chevron made huge acquisitions of oil and...