The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony
The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony

Author: David E. Spiro

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-06-30

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1501711970

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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. David Spiro has followed the money trail, and the story he tells contradicts the accepted beliefs. Most of the sudden flush of new oil wealth didn't 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 policymakers 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 consumption of its citizenry.

Freezing Assets
Freezing Assets

Author: Mahvash Alerassool

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1992-12-18

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1349225320

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In November 1979 the US government froze over $14 billion of Iranian assets in response to the Iranian revolution and the seizure of US hostages. Since then, freezing sovereign assets has become an increasingly frequent and highly effective economic sanction. It has been used against Nicaragua, Libya, Panama, Kuwait and Iraq. This book is a comprehensive study of asset-freezing as an economic sanction and a political weapon. It analyses the international financial, legal and political implications of asset-freezing. It concentrates on the freeze against Iran to discover the initial motivations and mechanisms of asset-freezing. The book examines its political, economic and legal basis: beginning with the US International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977; through the legal implications of the extraterritorial application of the freeze order and the litigation in European courts; and ending with an examination of the political agreement that resolved the Iranian crisis in 1981. It shows how this agreement superseded litigation in the US courts which would have produced judgments far more favourable to Iran. Finally, there is a comparative analysis of freezes after the Iranian case and suggestions for the ways in which countries vulnerable to asset-freezing can protect themselves against this unilateral instrument of hegemony by a major financial power.

Oil and Development in the Arab Gulf States
Oil and Development in the Arab Gulf States

Author: Walid I. Sharif

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-11

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 1000966607

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Oil and Development in the Arab Gulf States (1985) brings together in one volume the manifold sources of information on the Arab Gulf region, especially the impact of oil revenues on its economic, political and social development. It provides a balanced core of primary and secondary sources on various aspects of the economics of Arab oil between 1973 and 1983.