Dace wrote:
> >Wasn't it US oil producers who initially kicked off the seventies price
> >hikes that were later blamed on the Opec Arabs?
> >
> >
> >--
> >James Heartfield
>
> After eliminating gold as the anchor of the world's economy in '71, Nixon
> wanted higher oil prices so as to derail the efforts of a conference of rich
> nations known as the Group of Twenty to create a new international system
> that would subordinate the dollar to so-called Spatial Drawing Rights.
> Nixon, of course, wanted the dollar to be king. "With the quadrupling of
> oil prices in the autumn of 1973, as Williamson points out, all the
> conference participants realised that collective planning of a new
> consensual international monetary order was dead and the whole negotiation
> fizzled out." (Gowan, The Global Gamble, page 20)
>
> "The Nixon administration was planning to get OPEC to greatly increase its
> oil prices a full two years before OPEC did so, and as early as 1972 the
> Nixon administration planned for the US private banks to recycle the
> petrodollars when OPEC finally did take US advice and jack up oil prices."
> (Page 21)
>
> According to his ambassador in Saudi Arabia at the time, Nixon just wanted
> to screw with the economies of Japan and Western Europe. But why would he
> want to do that unless to sabotage the new economic order they were trying
> to create?
>
> Gowan emphasizes that neither the US oil companies nor the banks had nearly
> enough imagination to concoct a scheme of this magnitude.
>
> Ted
-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu