Word: crude
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...experts call it the "war premium." For the U.S., heightened global anxiety about the security of Persian Gulf crude supplies has imposed an extra cost of more than $20 billion in higher oil prices since Iraq invaded Kuwait last August. The burden, acting like a new tax, helped push the U.S. into recession and put a drag on sluggish economies around the world. With every new rumor out of the Persian Gulf, the war premium swung menacingly. The gyrations gave rise to a frightening question: How high would oil prices skyrocket if fighting actually broke out -- $50 or even...
...answer arrived with stunning force last week. At the start of hostilities, crude prices rose briefly. On news of the initial success of Operation Desert Storm, they collapsed in their sharpest drop in history. At the New York Mercantile Exchange, oil contracts for February delivery fell $10.56 per bbl. on Thursday after an avalanche of sell orders forced a one- hour halt in trading moments after the opening bell. The frantic trading slashed the oil price to near the $20-per-bbl. level that prevailed just before the gulf crisis began. "Euphoria is too weak a word," observes John Lichtblau...
With every favorable turn in the war, oil prices will tend to fall because the world is awash in petroleum. The storage tanks of industrial countries are brimming with 3.5 billion bbl. of crude, a 96-day cache that is the largest in nearly a decade. The supply has built up because of slumping demand in the U.S. and other countries mired in recession, along with furious pumping by energy-rich nations to make up for the boycott of oil from Iraq and Kuwait. % Even without the two countries' combined daily output of 4.3 million bbl., the rest...
...Indian stranger as "cute" ? Or any native of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., talk of "open((ing)) your schmucky gob"? Does the world really need another lecherous British officer dithering, "I say, Lorna, I'm terribly keen on you"? At times, with their perfumed dissolutes and frustrated shrinks, the stories read like crude distillations of the Anglo-Indo-American vignettes of screenwriter-novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, or even like bite-size appetizers for the full-course feast of a Salman Rushdie novel...
...throughout the northern hemisphere. Not all experts agree with the grim forecasts, contending that Kuwaiti oil fields are too far apart to combine into one conflagration. If only some wells blow, the multibillion-dollar task of extinguishing the fires would be unlike any previous disaster. Much of Kuwait's crude lies close to the surface and could continuously feed the flames. Ensuing fire storms, producing temperatures exceeding 160 degreesF, could keep fire fighters at bay for a year. "Leaders involved in the conflict should become aware of the consequences," says Crutzen, "so that such an act of madness will...