Word: patches
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...those citizens of the oil patch with long memories, boom and bust cycles are as natural as Texas tumbleweeds and summer windstorms. What is different about the current collapse, though, is the speed with which it struck. Says Historian Fehrenbach: "Nothing in the past has come on as fast as this." For the moment, then, people can do little more than hold on, hoping that the cycle will one day turn again...
...sore spot as well. The oil-patch states of Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana have been so severely affected that their troubles could spoil the rest of the country's party, at least in the short run. Bankruptcies and layoffs plague the oil business and nearly every industry connected with it. Though the Labor Department announced last week that U.S. unemployment dipped to 7.2% in March, down a notch from 7.3% in February, the jobless rate has stayed unexpectedly high at least partly because of the oil- patch slump. Unemployment in Louisiana has reached...
...anticipated U.S. growth spurt may be delayed for several months while / the economy absorbs the oil-patch troubles. The beleaguered economies of Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, which account for 10% of total U.S. goods and services, are large enough to create a drag on the rest of the country. Major American oil companies have made billions of dollars in budget cutbacks, and that will at least temporarily offset the increased spending by other firms preparing for the good times ahead...
...ministers of OPEC, along with delegates from five other producing countries, met late last month in Geneva in an attempt to patch together an agreement for sopping up the glut. The nine-day marathon session degenerated into what one delegate called "a state of unprecedented disarray." Even the meeting quarters seemed a mockery of the group's onetime ability to intimidate the industrial powers. Because most of the Hotel Inter-Continental was already booked, the ministers had to cram into a tiny conference room for their meeting...
...recent weeks, though, bad loans in the U.S. oil patch have joined the long-standing Mexican problem at the top of bankers' worry lists. Energy loans gone sour have already forced the federal bailout of one major U.S. bank, Continental Illinois, in 1984, and the latest surge of bankruptcies in the energy belt could at least cause some smaller institutions to collapse. The top U.S. banks have an estimated $40 billion in oil and natural gas loans on their books, and more than half of the money has been lent to vulnerable small companies...