Right now in Dickinson, North Dakota, the local McDonalds is offering a $300 signing bonus to new employees. You heard that right, with a 7.7% nationwide unemployment rate, and persistently sluggish job growth and wage stagnation, the labor market of this one town in North Dakota is so tight, and employers are so desperate for workers, they’re offering a signing bonus for a job slinging fries.
And it’s not just Dickinson, unemployment in the entire state is 3.1%, GDP growth for the state is 7.6%, and housing there is in such short supply that one bedrooms are renting for more than $1000. What economic miracle has taken place in the plains, you might ask, to bring this about?
The answer is the Bakken formation, a subterranean rock formation that contains a thin, and until recently, more or less inaccessible, sea of oil within relatively hard rocks. But a revolution in the technology of extraction (including fracking) has helped unlock the oil in the Bakken and some speculate that the amount of extractable oil from just this one geological formation alone could surpass the reserves of all of Iraq and Kuwait combined. Production from the area has skyrocketed, and this new production boom is driving a larger national trend, pushing U.S. oil production up for the first time in a generation, and arresting what many believed was a permanent decline.
Compare the growth in crude-oil supply among a number of non-OPEC countries, and what you see is the U.S. obliterating the rest of the world. Employment in oil and gas extraction has surged to the highest level since 1992, (though we should note they still provide a tiny, tiny sliver of the country’s jobs, just under 200,000).
Our net oil imports are cratering. And now a number of analysts are predicting...
(Excerpt) Read more at tv.msnbc.com ...
