Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crises: The Global Curse of Black Gold

Description

Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crises studies the causes of the current oil and global financial crisis and shows how America's and the world's growing dependence on oil has created a repeating pattern of banking, currency, and energy-price crises. Unlike other books on the current financial crisis, which have focused on US indebtedness and American trade and economic policy, Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crises shows the reader a more complex picture in which transfers of wealth to and from the Middle East result in a perfect storm of global asset and financial market bubbles, increased unrest, terrorism and geopolitical conflicts, and eventually rising costs for energy. Only by addressing long-term energy policy challenges in the West, economic development challenges in the Middle East, and the investment horizons of financial market players can policymakers ameliorate the forces that have been causing repeating global economic crises.

Mahmoud A. El-Gamal, Ph.D., is Chair of the Department of Economics and Professor of Economics and Statistics at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he also holds the endowed Chair in Islamic Economics, Finance, and Management. Before joining Rice in 1998, he was an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He has also worked as an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester and the California Institute of Technology. During 1995-6, he worked as an economist in the Middle East Department of the International Monetary Fund. During the second half of 2004, he served as scholar in residence on Islamic finance at the U.S. Department of Treasury. He has published extensively in the areas of econometrics, economic dynamics, financial economics, economics of the Middle East, and the economic analysis of Islamic law. His most recent book was Islamic Finance: Law, Economics, and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Amy Myers Jaffe is the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow for Energy Studies at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and Associate Director of the Rice University Energy Program. Her research focuses on oil geopolitics, strategic energy policy, and energy economics. She is coeditor of Natural Gas and Geopolitics: From 1970 to 2040 (Cambridge University Press, 2005, with David G. Victor and Mark W. Hayes) and Energy in the Caspian Region: Present and Future (2002). She has published widely in academic journals and edited collections, including the keynote article 'Energy Security: Meeting the Growing Challenge of National Oil Companies' in the Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations (Summer 2007) and 'The Persian Gulf and the Geopolitics of Oil' in Survival (Spring 2006). Ms Jaffe served as project director of the Council on Foreign Relations task force on strategic energy policy. She currently serves as a strategic advisor to the American Automobile Association on developing an AAA members' voice on US energy policy debates.

'Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crises is impressively prescient in highlighting the risks associated with major imbalances in the global financial system. The book moves well beyond economic analysis to assess other factors that shape production decisions by major energy exporters. Above all, the authors continually - and rightly - stress the global nature of the challenges confronting us. The authors give Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crises a richness of analytic texture rare in books of its kind.' James A. Baker III, Former US Secretary of State, from the Foreword 'A boldly original and provocative display of the mutual amplifications since the 1970s of a global energy price cycle, a global finance cycle, and geopolitical turmoil in the Middle East into a super cycle that is 'endogenous and self-perpetuating'.' Clement M. Henry, University of Texas, Austin 'In today's geo-strategic environment, few threats are more perilous than the potential cutoff of energy supplies. Unfortunately, recent experience provides us little reason to be confident that market rationality will always win the day where petro-politics is concerned. El-Gamal and Jaffe offer a timely analysis of the potentially perilous interaction of oil insecurity, mounting U.S. debt, and Middle East geopolitical conflicts. They argue that the future stability of the dollar and financial markets remains very much tied to the fate of oil, a sobering reflection on a key challenge to U.S. foreign policy and international financial diplomacy. Scholars and statesmen alike should take note of the provocative analysis in Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crises.' Senator Richard Lugar, Ranking Minority Member, US Senate Foreign Relations Committee 'Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crises is compelling reading, not simply because it clearly explains the global curse of 'black gold.' It also weaves together the interdependent relationships binding the inherently cyclical foundations of the petroleum sector with global currency dislocations, wealth transfer adjustments impacting emerging markets, radical income disruptions in countries that produce oil (and other commodities), and the domestic and international repercussions for geopolitics and global violence. No other study articulates so pointedly the core global issues that impact today's global political economy. It takes the combined talents and analyses of two leading scholars from the overlapping professions of economics, Middle East studies, and energy studies to be able to provide the general public, scholarly professionals and policymakers alike with this seminal, pioneering study of the issues at the heart of today's globalized world.' Edward L. Morse, Managing Director at Louis Capital Markets, former Chief Energy Economist at Lehman Brothers and publisher of Petroleum Intelligence Weekly