Word: crude
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...economic crises have a tangled skein of causes, but the thread of this one starts in the early '90s. After the Persian Gulf War, as Middle East producers pumped their way to recovery, the price of crude oil dropped steadily, then stayed low for nearly a de- cade, fueling the global economic boom. By early '99, a barrel of oil clocked in at just...
...budgets slide into the red, and other exporters, such as Russia and Mexico, went virtually bankrupt from lost oil revenues. Finally, in the past year, OPEC's members woke up. Why should the West profit from unparalleled prosperity while they drew up austerity plans? They boosted the cost of crude by slowing production, until a barrel fetched nearly $35. Americans, like Europeans, started to grumble at the steady rise in the price they paid to gas up. By summer, U.S. drivers were paying around $1.70 per gal., Europeans anywhere from...
...fans today may be well versed in the tale of Tupac and Biggie, the show transports them back to an era they may find hard to imagine. After all, the almost pharaonic fantasy world of a Puffy Combs video is light-years away from the hand-stenciled mimeographs with crude sketches advertising an around-the-way appearance of Kurtis Blow or a block party featuring Grandmaster Flash. This was a do-it yourself movement in the outer boroughs, a culture being built by hand, brick by brick - one to which the suits running the music industry in the glass towers...
...Bill Richardson's troubles, history may remember this as the year the secretary of energy got a very big promotion. Richardson announced Friday the administration's intention to dun the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for 30 million barrels of crude oil, and while the professed reason is to head off a heating-oil shortage this winter, Bill Clinton may have just created a new version of Alan Greenspan...
...work - if heating-oil refineries already operating furiously at 95-100 percent capacities can somehow refine more oil in time for the cold weather. It will almost definitely push down the short-term market price of crude, just like it did in 1991, because the U.S. government has now signaled its willingness to be a ground-level player in the world's oil markets at times of "crisis." And that's precisely the problem: "Crisis" has just been defined dangerously down...