Word: pumps
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Starting this week, oil companies will have to pump about $7 into the national treasuries of Middle East host countries for each barrel of crude they take from the desert sands. Once corporate profit margins and the cost of transportation are cranked in, the price of crude in world markets will nearly triple, to something like $9 per bbl. At present prices, worldwide customers shell out about $22 billion a year for the 6.2 billion bbl. of crude that the Middle East exports. When the new prices take effect, the tab will leap overnight to $55 billion or more...
...Europe, the new oil prices could add 3% or so to an already spiraling rate of inflation. In the U.S., the Government estimates that they will add one or two cents a gallon to the average pump price of gasoline. The higher prices will also create multimillion-dollar deficits in European trade balances, possibly upsetting the precarious currency alignments that have recently begun to bring a degree of stability to the international monetary scene. In the U.S., Europe and Japan, economic slowdowns and unemployment increases will be less drastic than they would have been if the Arabs had really made...
...avert cheating and frustrate would-be black marketeers. The ration coupons will be about a third the size of a dollar bill and, like currency, they will be printed by a difficult-to-counterfeit intaglio process. When a driver bought gas and handed over his coupons at the pump, he would have to sign his name and write his license-plate number on each one, so that they could not readily be reused. The coupons would be good for only 60 days, so that speculators would be discouraged from hoarding large quantities on the hunch that coupon values would rise...
...Agnew will need more help than that from his friends. What friends? "Well," says one former aide, "there's Frank Sinatra." Agnew and Sinatra dined with two other people at Chicago's classy, brassy Pump Room a few weeks back (total tab: $150), and the aging crooner is asking members of his crowd to contribute to the cause. Sinatra is also acting as agent for the book that Agnew plans to write some day, and is said to be asking $500,000. So far, no takers...
...handful of sand in the economic gearbox. But for oil-exporting nations outside the Arab bloc, the move was pure serendipity. Almost overnight, as global shortages reached crisis proportions, the value of their oil deposits began to zoom. Yet the oil producers have resisted the temptation to try to pump fast enough to make up for the Arab cutback. Instead, they have cannily held output to roughly ordinary levels while sharply scaling up prices. That strategy is resulting in a kind of forced, massive transfer of wealth from the rich oil-burning countries that may spur economic growth...