A transcript of Catherine’s May 19, 2011 interview of Jim Norman on Oil Card Geopolitics is now available to Solari Report Subscribers.
Subscribers can access the PDF here.
From the transcript:
On Jim’s book The Oil Card: The basic thing about this book is, it’s a how to, how to manipulate oil prices on a global macro level. Intuitively, people would say that’s impossible, you can’t do it, it’s a huge fungible market, you can’t do that. But in fact, if you go back and see, there’s a clear paper trail record of how the United States and its allies actually did manipulate downward the price of oil in the 1980s to bust the Soviet Union. It took a decade or more, but we were extremely successful at it. And you could go back and see exactly the levers that were used, we leaned on the Saudis to produce more oil, we leaned on the Majors to produce more oil; the NYMEX came into existence which was characterized by a barrage of short selling, a whole bunch of stuff going on that basically depressed the price of oil as a global commodity and it took away enough of the hard currency for the Soviet Union that they actually had to go hat in hand to borrow $100 billion dollars to feed their people, which was the beginning of the end because when the popular uprisings began in Eastern Europe the strings attached to those loans prevented them from sending their armies into Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union ultimately collapsed. The Russian economists, going back and looking at it and saying, what did us in? Yup, it was that oil price.
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