Word: crude
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Welcome to Oil Shock 2005. The spot price of brent crude hit $68 last Thursday?up 44% in the past 12 months?before easing slightly the following day. With the price of oil on the rise, its effects in Asia, on producers and consumers alike, are everywhere to be seen. Last week Beijing continued its frantic push to secure foreign energy reserves when China National Petroleum, a state-owned oil company, trumped an Indian government-controlled firm with a winning $4.2 billion bid for PetroKazakhstan, a Canadian-owned firm with vast oil and gas reserves in the former Soviet republic...
...impact of the 21st century's first oil alarm was equally apparent in other developing Asian countries. In Indonesia?a proud member of the OPEC cartel, never mind the fact that it's now a net importer of crude oil?the currency is in free fall and the government is burning through its foreign exchange reserves, thanks to a longstanding and increasingly ruinous policy of providing subsidized fuel to consumers. Gasoline in Jakarta costs a mere 27? per liter; some economists worry that if the government continues to spend an estimated $1 billion a month on fuel subsidies...
...price hikes so far, estimates Morgan Stanley economist Andy Xie, mean the Asia-Pacific region is spending 1.2% more of its total GDP on oil imports than it did last year. "There's no question that oil is the strongest headwind for growth now," says Xie. And if crude prices stay at current levels or go higher, the pain will only intensify. "This is a very delicate moment, no doubt about...
...demand is still increasing?albeit not as quickly as last year?driven by increasing consumption in China, India and the U.S. Unless that demand cools, the fear is that prices will inevitably continue to surge. Analysts who expected global economic growth to slow?thus curbing some demand for crude?as oil passed $40 and then $50 per barrel have been proved wrong. "Warnings that [$50-a-barrel oil] would threaten a global downturn turned out to be too pessimistic," says Richard Berner, an economist at Morgan Stanley in New York. With prices threatening to bust through $70, though, the chances...
...says is an imminent U.S. invasion. A public effort to whack him, offered from the right-wing Christian establishment so closely aligned with President Bush, is just what Chavez needs to keep his approval ratings soaring as high as the price of the Venezuelan oil he controls, the largest crude reserves in the hemisphere...