Word: petroleum
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...boost Brazil from the Third to the First World, and he is convinced he can do it with a freer market, greater industrial efficiency and a leaner bureaucracy. Certainly, Brazil's potential is enormous. It has immense rivers and forests, rich agricultural lands, huge deposits of gold, gems, petroleum, iron ore and minerals. With a gross domestic product of $350 billion and annual exports of $34 billion, it is Latin America's most developed nation...
...alongside that highly industrialized Brazil lives another, desperately poor country where 70% of the 150 million citizens live in poverty. That is the legacy of the chronic overspending that began in the 1970s when military rulers borrowed heavily from Western banks to cope with spiraling petroleum prices and to finance an ambitious industrial expansion scheme. By the time Collor took office, Brazil was saddled with a $115 billion foreign debt. Interest payments to foreign commercial banks were stopped last July. Chaos loomed as the economy zoomed into hyperinflation, with prices rising at a rate of more than 100,000% annually...
...Saudis got tired of playing the sucker and flooded the market with their unrivaled stores of crude, pushing prices down in an attempt to punish the cheaters and force them to play straight. That method proved of little value in taming Kuwait and the U.A.E., which have rich petroleum reserves and tend to favor lower prices as a way of discouraging Western countries from pursuing alternative energy sources. But Iraq desperately needs higher prices, and Saddam reckoned he had something more powerful than the Saudis' economic clout with which to frighten the renegades: the mightiest army in the Arab world...
Before 1973, no other global industry had ever been so perfectly integrated, meaning that the companies controlled their product from oil well to gasoline tank. But the rise of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and the oil embargoes of the 1970s began to interrupt that arrangement. Newly confident Third World governments abrogated or phased out the concessions under which Western oil companies had pumped oil on their territory. The national oil companies, which controlled 75% of the world's crude output, insisted on higher prices that cut into the profit margins of Western companies. The once cozy world...
...Kuwait Petroleum has moved even more aggressively than Aramco into refining and marketing. Kuwait bought Gulf's refining and marketing operations in Europe in 1983, and recently launched an exploration and marketing campaign in the Far East, beginning with Thailand. Brags Kuwait's Sheik Ali Khalifa Al- Sabah, who recently switched posts from Oil Minister to Finance Minister: "We will be flying our colors in other countries soon. We expect to find many new opportunities in Eastern Europe, and if an opportunity arises in the U.S., we will look seriously at that...