Word: petroleum
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...most startling and significant example of this change in underlying trends is the price of oil. Nothing did more to propel inflation ever higher during the 1970s than the success of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in raising the benchmark price of a barrel of crude from $1.80 in 1970 to $34 now. Besides the skyrocketing increases in retail prices of gasoline, the spiral helped drive up everything from apartment rents, which are affected by fuel costs, to the price of food, which is hauled to supermarkets in diesel-burning trucks...
...With petroleum prices in worldwide retreat, does it make any sense for the U.S. to enact a tax that might nudge the price back up again just for Americans? In a rising chorus, economists and energy experts everywhere have been answering with a deafening yes. By last week there were signs that Washington was beginning to listen. Proposals for levies of various sorts were under active examination in Congress, and top White House officials reported growing support for an energy-tax package within the Administration itself...
Claus von Bulow was born in 1927. The native Dane rose early in international social circles, joining the European high society during his school days in England. He rose in the oil business and at one point worked for American petroleum billionaire John Paul Getty. In the late 1960s, he married the ultra rich Martha "Sunny" Crawford von Auersperg, a Pittsburgh utility heiress, and they lived well, if not happily, in her Rhode Island mansion. But by 1979, he became distrenchanted with her love, or hungry for her money, or both. He tried to murder her twice with insulin injections...
With world oil markets already in shambles, ministers from the 13-nation Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries are planning to gather this weekend in Vienna to make a desperate gamble. They will try to shore up the price of crude on world markets by agreeing to set a production ceiling of 18.5 million bbl. per day, down from 19.2 million bbl. per day currently, and to parcel out the resulting cuts. That is something that the fiercely nationalistic members of the organization have never before managed to achieve. Many Western analysts, emboldened by strife-torn OPEC's recent setbacks...
...House of Saud cannot go below 6.2 million bbl. per day without dipping into capital reserves to finance a variety of ambitious construction and industrialization plans. The Saudis are also reluctant to step out on a limb within OPEC. Says Lawrence Goldstein, research director of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation: "If the Saudis cut, they have to have some indication that the rest of the organization will not simply make up the reduction in volume and take away the market share...