“We must accept finite disappointment, but must never lose infinite hope.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
“The Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and the oil age will not end because we run out of oil”. This is an example of Sheikh Yamani’s clairvoyancy, who died a few days ago and who was the oil minister of Saudi Arabia from 1962 to 1986. Throughout…
We are living in turbulent times and our world can attest, since a few days ago, to the equivalent of a declaration of war taking place on the oil market. Saudi Arabia, that is suffering a fall of more than 20% of its exports to China (its biggest client) due to the coronavirus epidemic,…
The US is made a distant comeback. Its dollar was, at the start of the 1970s, in a precarious situation due to the exorbitant cost of the Vietnam war and the various social programmes whose combined effects meant the country could no longer maintain the parity with gold that was established in 1944 at…
Is Saudi Arabia still an important partner to the US? The question answers itself, at least partially, with the Middle East having drastically changed since the strategic and fundamental alliance made in 1943 by President Franklin Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud. It’s now a distant time when FDR boldly, vociferously claimed that “the defence…
Has the Iranian rial lost more than half of its value against the dollar since the start of this year? It’s routine for this country’s economy that has seen this same thing other times as, since the end of the Iraq war, each Iranian president has effectively been faced with a monetary crisis. From 1989…
At the end of the Second World War, the enormous reserves of American gold – the largest in the world at the time – allowed this metal to construct a new world order centred around the dollar. The Bretton Woods Conference held in 1944 formalised the consecration of the greenback, around which all other currencies…
The collapse in oil prices has not brought with it the happiness that had been counted on, since economic fundamentals have not improved. As for Western consumption, its slight progress is owed more to a further drop in inflation indices than to an increase in salaries and revenues that is worthy of being called so.…
The Angolan kwanza collapsed by 15% in a few hours as soon as the country’s authorities effected its devaluation a few days ago. Last month it was Azerbaijan’s currency, the manat, which lost a third of its value in a few hours when its national central bank decided to abandon its indexation to the American…
It is the abundance of cash resources which has propelled financial markets, likewise for all assets in general, since 2009. This gigantic reflation, orchestrated to the sound of 10 to 12 trillion dollars being injected into the system, has been the main and fundamental source, having authorised a global assessment, and even euphoria, since certain…
The debacle of oil prices has greatly exceeded that of the global financial crisis of 2008 and the Asian crisis of 1998. And it is much more severe. At the end of this summer of 2015, OPEC is just a shadow of its former self: simply put, it has been de facto dissolved and this…