Word: contract
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...bang. OPEC raised prices during 1979 by an average of 94.7%, to $25 a bbl.?vs. $12.84 a year ago and a mere $2 in 1970. Moreover, oil-exporting nations shifted a growing proportion of their output to the spot market, where oil not tied up under contract is sold for whatever price buyers will pay. Before the Iranian revolution, the spot market accounted for only 5% of the oil moving in world trade, and prices differed little from OPEC's official ones. During 1979, anywhere from 10% to 33% of internationally traded crude bought by the industrial countries...
...they might lose a way of life. From the Arab oil boycott of 1973 onward, the decade was bathed in a cold Spenglerian apprehension that the lights were about to go out, that history's astonishing material indulgence of the U.S. was about to end. Possibilities seemed to contract. Americans tutored in the gospels of progress began for the first time to peer at the future as a possible enemy. A few of them started waving pistols in the gas lines...
Most likely, Woodward and Armstrong don't mean everything they say about journalistic blindness. Perhaps they faced a more immediate problem--under contract to write a book, they produced it, realizing that it really contained little in the way of significant revelations. It is easy to praise them for their legwork and interviewing skill, easy to praise their book as interesting, readable and as good an account as exists of the way the Supreme Court operates...