Book Review
Card catalog description
"Between 1973 and 1980, the cost of crude oil rose suddenly and
dramatically, precipitating convulsions in international politics.
Conventional wisdom holds that international capital markets
adjusted automatically and remarkably well: Enormous amounts of
money flowed into oil-rich states, and efficient markets then
placed that new money in cash-poor Third World economies. This
massive reallocation of wealth is labeled petrodollar
recycling."--BOOK JACKET. "David Spiro has followed the money
trail, and the story he tells, based on interviews and a
painstaking accumulation of fragmentary evidence, contradicts the
accepted beliefs both in the particulars and in broad outline. Most
of the sudden flush of new oil wealth did not go to poor
oil-importing countries around the globe. Instead the United States
made a deal with Saudi Arabia to sell it U.S. securities in secret,
a deal resulting in a substantial portion of Saudi assets being
held by the U.S. government. With this arrangement, the U.S.
government violated its agreements with allies in the developed
world. Spiro argues that American policy makers took this action to
prop up otherwise intolerable levels of U.S. public debt. In
effect, recycled OPEC wealth subsidized the debt-happy policies of
the U.S. government as well as the debt-happy consumerism of its
citizenry."--BOOK JACKET.
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