Word: economists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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With OPEC in disarray and vulnerable, bold action by oil-importing nations to cut their dependence on foreign petroleum cannot be easily countered by cartel members. Operating through OPEC, their monopolistic, price-propping has placed an enormous and continuing burden on oil consumers everywhere. Economist Otto Eckstein, president of Data Resources Inc., estimates that OPEC'S policies have been bloating the world's oil bill by $40 billion to $60 billion a year. Says he: "We need that cartel like we need a tourniquet around our necks. Any form of free competition is going to lead...
...cure but a disease that institutionalizes inflation, added Okun. He estimates that "if all payrolls were indexed instead of the roughly 15% that are now, the consumer price index would have risen more than 20%, not 13%." Inflation is only one consequence of increasing energy costs, said Economist Murray Weidenbaum, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He believes that U.S. industry's reasonably successful drive to restrict energy consumption may be hurting productivity because companies are reducing the use of energy-gulping machines...
...exposed by the radioactive clouds rising from Three Mile Island, the flames spitting from the DC-10 that lost an engine over Chicago, the poisons seeping into the Love Canal. The frustrations of economic theory were revealed by the inability of the disciples of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist whose market-manipulating philosophies have dominated policymaking since the 1950s and 1960s, to deal with the stagflation realities of laggard growth, runaway prices and receding productivity in the post-industrial...
Even if the Carter Administration could find ways of making sanctions against Iran stick, they would have little effect over the short run. Concludes Harald Malmgren, a respected international economist and consultant in Washington: "The U.S. near term leverage is simply less than it appears. No matter what the U.S. does economically, Iran can make this thing drag on for many more months to come...
...Saudi gambit is risky. By increasing a full $6 per bbl., the Saudi government is, like it or not, obviously tempting other cartel members to do much the same. Warns Walter Levy, an international oil economist: "This is the beginning of a further round of price increases. As long as spot prices remain substantially higher than OPEC prices, we are in an ever escalating situation...