Word: cartelism
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...odds were excellent that the diamond in the engagement ring I gave my fiancée had passed through the De Beers chain. At the time I bought it in 2000, the cartel controlled up to 75% of the world's rough diamonds. The most likely point of origin-statistically speaking-was the mine at Orapa in Botswana. But the symbol of my love also could have come from Russian Siberia or the Premier Mine in South Africa or from the war spoils of Angola. There was no way to trace its history, except to say De Beers' office...
...generates $83 billion per year for Venezuela compared to $53 billion in 2000. OPEC ministers will probably decline to cut back output much, if at all, especially since the record revenues they're enjoying would make it a difficult public relations feat. Still, Ram?rez says he doubts the cartel will ever again allow prices to sink as low, or outputs to rise as high, as they did at the end of the 20th century, when Venezuela was even considering dropping out of OPEC shortly before Ch?vez's election...
...Since leftist President Hugo Ch?vez began convincing the cartel's 11 member nations (of which Venezuela is a founder) to rein in world oil supply again after he took office in 1999, the price of crude has lept from less than $10 per barrel to a record $70-plus today. So Ch?vez is using the occasion of hosting a major OPEC meeting this week to trumpet the new mojo he's helped give OPEC - as well as to lobby to bring oil-producing neighbors like Ecuador into OPEC. "This OPEC meeting holds a lot of meaning for us," says Ch?vez...
...exert more state control over drilling projects has reduced investment. (Venezuela insists it is producing up to 3.5 million barrels a day, though many analysts put it at little over 2.5 million.) But the bottom line is that since 2000, the last time Ch?vez hosted an OPEC gathering, the cartel's daily output has increased by fewer than 2 million barrels to 28 million today - even as the exploding petro-appetite of emerging giants like China and India has put enormous new pressures on global oil supplies, and prices...
...Saudi Arabia (260 billion barrels) as the global oil king. "Venezuela has never been this well positioned in the world," says Ram?rez. Nor, it seems, has OPEC - and neither Ram?rez nor Ch?vez are likely to let their Middle Eastern counterparts forget that it was Venezuela that helped pull the cartel out of the low-price desert...