Word: cartels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bench mark," price of crude to a record $18 per bbl., up fully 42% since the first of the year. That is the price that Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates will charge. The other ten OPEC members, which account for almost two-thirds of the cartel's exports, will sell at $20 per bbl. Reason: most are already charging an average of $17.50 per bbl. as a result of premiums and surcharges, and a rise of a mere 500 per bbl. hardly seemed worth the trouble...
...specially attractive crudes, such as Nigeria's and Libya's low-sulfur oil, which is now much in demand for refining into gasoline. Veteran observers of past OPEC behavior expect the differentials soon to be turning up as part of the price for almost any grade of cartel crude. As a portent of things to come, the Algerians announced that they would immediately start charging the top dollar possible...
Though the cartel made a halfhearted effort to pass off the new price structure as a ceiling on the rising cost of crude, not even the delegates seemed to believe it. With world demand exceeding supply, nations appear willing to pay virtually any price. Said one Indonesian delegate: "We're faced with a shortage of oil that seems irreversible. It is hard to believe that prices can be kept down." The former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins, now a private oil-industry consultant, asserts, "The first time that any oil-importing nation offers a price above...
...adds injury to insult when hardliners like Iran and Libya keep threatening to cut back production in order to prop up prices. Remarked one middle-of-the-road delegate: "You just cannot believe how greedy these Iranians have become. They think they have invented the wheel." One of the cartel's greediest leaders, Libya's strongman, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, touched off a mini-panic on Wall Street at week's end. An Arab magazine quoted him as threatening to halt Libyan oil exports for up to four years and appealing to other oil producers...
...Libya, which pumps some 2 million bbl. daily and is the cartel's fifth largest producer, were to take such a step, the additional squeeze on world petroleum supplies would be devastating. Even though Gaddafi has made bombastic threats before and never carried them out, the shares of Occidental Petroleum and Marathon Oil, both big users of Libyan crude, came under such intense selling pressure on the New York Stock Exchange that trading had to be briefly halted. Only later was it learned that the irresponsible threat was probably inspired by nothing more than pique. Earlier in June...