“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…
The Saudis’ decision to suspend indefinitely the sensationally announced sale of 5% of the national oil company, Aramco, has called the credibility of the Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, directly into question. The offering of this giant on the stock market was in fact the cornerstone of the Prince’s politics, hoping to diversify his Kingdom’s…
According to statements made by the then President of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, “Qatar has too much money”. In fact, only the insiders were familiar with this Emirate prior to the 1990s, even though the little State has distinguished itself as the richest in the world per capita thanks to the proliferation of its oil…
Qatar is an island. At least, it has become one, but not without gradually forging new alliances and trade routes that will influence the balances in the Middle East in the long term. This is how, more than nine months after feeling the wrath of Saudi Arabia, Qatar has now come to circumvent the embargo…
Qatar’s real crime? Having led a foreign policy at complete odds with that of the other Gulf nations. Things had been seriously flaring up between these different emirates (and Saudi Arabia) under the reign of the last Prince Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who came to power in 1995. Then, the (unfounded) hopes that Hamad…
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 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…
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…