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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: energyplay who wrote (29823)	3/20/2003 11:30:42 PM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 74559

The same special set of circumstances allowed small countries or city states to amass an amount of wealth high above their "natural Size". Those circumstances have changed, those entities will return to their "natural size" as Jay is already seeing happening in HK. Or as Singapore is feeling the pinch for the last four and half years. I keep telling MQ that the small nations will feel the pinch as the US is downsized. As a proof there are only pigmy nations supporting the US tentative to hold on to its present size. But you are going to say: "You can't say UK is a pigmy" Yes and not. The UK has been desperately hanging on to its power nation status. Supporting the US which give them a spurious sense of being a power nation albeit second class. Return to a natural size won't happen over night. But it is happening in front of our eyes right now.

To: energyplay who wrote (29823)	3/20/2003 11:44:29 PM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 74559

As the US sees its power diminishing, it starts taking pre-emptive measures to avoid the power transfer to others. It is not the need for fuel gas guzzlers that prompts the present adventure. It is the need to keep resources -in this case oil- in its grip. The US knows that others can't threaten it with a conventional war. They are safe in that respect. But its economic power is threatened. What resource at its hand will keep competing economies in check? oil, or course! It has always been used before: For an European war to stop, it is necessary just to block the flow of external resources being imported. During the 1956 invasion of the Suez, the U.S. threatened to deny petroleum supplies to France and Great Britain if they did not withdraw their forces. Europe was then 64% short of petroleum requirements. Spare capacity available in Venezuela was owned by Gulf Oil and Creole Petroleum, President Eisenhower warned the British and the French that additional supplies from these sources would not be forthcoming until they agreed to total withdraw. Bergsten, Fred C., Horst T., Moran Theodore H., American Multinationals and American Interests, Washington, D.C., The Brooking Institution, 1978. The US is not battling Saddam. The US is fighting for its survival as a power nation threatened with downsize. The danger is, the more patent it becomes that it's power is vanishing, the more desperate it gets and the more dangerous for others it becomes. As a result the more alone it will go as other countries -that know the script- extricate themselves from the falling hammer.