Tape 165 - Reader's Questions, Oil Cartel
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- | Hello, this is William Clark of the Chicago Tribune, | 0:05 |
saying welcome once again on behalf of | 0:08 | |
Instructional Dynamics Incorporated | 0:10 | |
to a visit with the distinguished economist | 0:13 | |
Professor Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago. | 0:15 | |
As we record this visit, March is almost upon us. | 0:18 | |
It's getting close. | 0:22 | |
And Milton, we always seem to run out of time | 0:24 | |
before we get to the letters from your subscribers. | 0:26 | |
Suppose we start today's visit | 0:29 | |
by taking up a couple of those letters. | 0:31 | |
The first one I have is from Mr. Vaughan E. Taylor, | 0:34 | |
vice president of the Reuben H. Donnelley Corporation, | 0:38 | |
and Mr. Taylor writes as follows. | 0:41 | |
"In February's Fortune, Mr. Roy O. Little, | 0:43 | |
"former chairman of Textron, likened our present recession | 0:46 | |
"to the recession of 1920 and '21. | 0:49 | |
"For your convenience, I am enclosing a copy of the article. | 0:52 | |
"Based on his analysis, Mr. Little predicts | 0:55 | |
"a sharp reduction in consumer and business demand | 0:58 | |
"with a resultant drop in raw material costs | 1:01 | |
"and interest rates, as well as the virtual disappearance | 1:05 | |
"of inflation by year end 1975. | 1:08 | |
"To offset the forthcoming reduction in demand, | 1:11 | |
"Mr. Little recommends cutting inventories, overhead, | 1:14 | |
"and operating costs, paying off current bank debts, | 1:17 | |
"and reducing or eliminating long-term commitments | 1:21 | |
"for raw materials at fixed prices. | 1:24 | |
"How would you agree or disagree | 1:26 | |
"with Mr. Little's analysis and conclusions?" | 1:28 | |
- | There's much to be said for his basic analogy. | 1:32 |
There is a good deal of similarity | 1:36 | |
between the present recession and the recession of 1920-21. | 1:38 | |
Both are extremely sharp. | 1:42 | |
Both follow a period of rapid inflation. | 1:46 | |
But there are also important differences. | 1:51 | |
I think the major differences are two, | 1:54 | |
one in magnitude, another in quality. | 1:57 | |
So far as magnitude is concerned, | 2:01 | |
the inflation that preceded the 1920 recession | 2:04 | |
was considerably sharper than the inflation | 2:09 | |
that has preceded this one. | 2:11 | |
Prices in the United States doubled during World War I, | 2:15 | |
and half of that increase, roughly, came after the war. | 2:18 | |
So from the end of World War I in 1918 to early 1920, | 2:22 | |
prices rose, if I remember rightly, by about a third, | 2:28 | |
from 150 to 220 or 160 to 220 in terms of index numbers. | 2:31 | |
That was a very much sharper price rise | 2:36 | |
than we experienced in the past year. | 2:40 | |
The second thing about the price rise | 2:44 | |
is that unlike the price rise we've been experiencing, | 2:48 | |
that one was widely regarded by everyone as temporary. | 2:52 | |
It did not really get built into people's expectations. | 2:56 | |
It was interpreted as an effect of World War I, | 2:59 | |
which it was, and the post-war rise | 3:01 | |
as an aftermath of the war, | 3:04 | |
rather than as a element of a new era. | 3:05 | |
With respect to the present or more recent price rise, | 3:08 | |
I think the situation is different. | 3:12 | |
Almost everyone interprets it as part | 3:14 | |
of a longer-term phenomenon, and therefore a good deal | 3:17 | |
more of it has been built into people's expectations. | 3:20 | |
With respect to the recession, in January 1920, | 3:24 | |
the key step toward the ending of the recession | 3:29 | |
was a decision by the Federal Reserve Board | 3:32 | |
to raise its discount rate. | 3:36 | |
In the prior year, it had been accommodating the Treasury | 3:37 | |
in floating securities, and had been essentially | 3:41 | |
holding down the interest rates. | 3:43 | |
As a result, it had been pouring out | 3:45 | |
a great volume of credit, interestingly enough, | 3:47 | |
to private sources, because the government itself | 3:51 | |
was running a balanced budget. | 3:54 | |
It was refinancing bonds rather than floating more. | 3:55 | |
The wartime taxes that had been imposed in 1918 were | 3:58 | |
just beginning to bring in their full revenue potential. | 4:01 | |
Expenditures had gone down sharply | 4:04 | |
with the dismantling of the armed forces, | 4:06 | |
so that interestingly enough, the government | 4:08 | |
was having a surplus during 1919, early '20. | 4:10 | |
But nonetheless, the Fed had been | 4:14 | |
increasing the money supply very rapidly | 4:16 | |
by holding down its discount rate | 4:18 | |
and by stimulating private credit. | 4:20 | |
The discount rate at that time was | 4:22 | |
of vastly more importance than it is now because | 4:24 | |
in January 1920, total borrowings at commercial banks | 4:27 | |
exceeded the whole of their required reserves. | 4:32 | |
They had essentially negative owned reserves. | 4:34 | |
That sum today, I'm not sure | 4:38 | |
what the exact magnitude would be, | 4:41 | |
but it would be, oh, a very large multiple | 4:43 | |
of any volume of borrowings that we now have. | 4:45 | |
Under those circumstances, when in 1920 | 4:50 | |
the Fed suddenly raised its discount rate, | 4:52 | |
this put enormous pressure on banks to contract, | 4:55 | |
and you had a very sharp, | 4:58 | |
and this is the second difference of that period from now, | 4:59 | |
you had a very sharp contraction | 5:02 | |
in the quantity of money from early 1920 | 5:04 | |
to the middle and later 1920, | 5:08 | |
and this produced a very sharp decline, | 5:10 | |
not only in economic activity, but in the price level. | 5:17 | |
If I remember rightly, the decline in prices in 1920-21 | 5:19 | |
was at the fastest rate of any decline in prices | 5:26 | |
that we've ever experienced. | 5:29 | |
What it was, was a puncturing of a bubble, | 5:32 | |
and when the bubble broke, it really collapsed, | 5:36 | |
so that by the summer of 1921, as Mr. Little properly said, | 5:38 | |
you had falling prices instead of rising prices. | 5:44 | |
You had essentially a zero rate of price increase. | 5:47 | |
And then for the rest of that decade, | 5:50 | |
well, you had some recovery in prices to '23. | 5:52 | |
From '23 to '29, prices, if anything, fell. | 5:55 | |
Now, that's the second difference. | 5:58 | |
While the Fed has been following | 6:00 | |
a very restrained monetary policy | 6:02 | |
so that the M1 has grown only at the rate | 6:04 | |
of 1% per year over the past seven months | 6:06 | |
and M2 at the rate of 5%, | 6:10 | |
there is essentially no chance | 6:12 | |
that it is really going to reduce the quantity of money, | 6:14 | |
that you're going to get a positive fall. | 6:16 | |
And indeed, I believe the outlook is | 6:18 | |
that the Fed is in the process of shifting, | 6:20 | |
and it's trying and will succeed in getting | 6:24 | |
a very rapid increase in the quantity of money, | 6:26 | |
so that while up to now you might say | 6:28 | |
there are some similarities, I think from here on out, | 6:30 | |
the danger on the monetary side | 6:34 | |
is of stimulating a new inflation, | 6:35 | |
not of forcing a further decline. | 6:38 | |
On the other hand, based on what has already happened, | 6:41 | |
there is every reason to expect that this recession | 6:45 | |
will be the most serious of the post-war period, | 6:47 | |
that it will extend to late in the year. | 6:49 | |
The question is what about the advice that Mr. Little gives? | 6:51 | |
That advice is premised not merely | 6:56 | |
on a tapering off of inflation, | 6:58 | |
but on a positive decline in prices. | 7:00 | |
Raw material prices, of course, are very variable, | 7:02 | |
and they already have declined much. | 7:06 | |
But if we take the price level as a whole, | 7:07 | |
it is almost inconceivable to me that it will really decline | 7:10 | |
absolutely over the next few years. | 7:13 | |
I think we will be very lucky if, on the contrary, | 7:15 | |
we don't have a renewal of inflation. | 7:18 | |
It may well be that by year end '75, | 7:20 | |
the rate of inflation may be in the range of 5%, 6%. | 7:23 | |
It might be a little lower. | 7:30 | |
Obviously, just as we overshot on the way up, | 7:31 | |
we might overshoot on the way down. | 7:34 | |
And so just as we went up to 12% | 7:37 | |
on the basic built-in inflation of 6% or 7%, | 7:40 | |
we might go down to 4% when | 7:43 | |
the basic rate of inflation is 6%. | 7:45 | |
But looking forward for more than a few months, | 7:48 | |
I think it would be very unwise | 7:51 | |
to anticipate a decline in prices. | 7:53 | |
Moreover, so far as interest rates are concerned, | 7:59 | |
again, they are coming down, | 8:01 | |
but again, that's going to be a temporary phenomenon | 8:02 | |
as the economy turns around, | 8:05 | |
and as we have an increase in quantity of money, | 8:07 | |
interest rates will go up. | 8:09 | |
Obviously, so far as individual business is concerned, | 8:11 | |
it may well be sensible to cut | 8:15 | |
inventories, overhead, and so on. | 8:17 | |
It seems to me all of that has to do with | 8:18 | |
how you manage a particular business and enterprise. | 8:20 | |
But I find it hard to believe | 8:24 | |
that a business would be well advised, if they can do so, | 8:26 | |
to eliminate or reduce long-term commitments | 8:31 | |
for raw materials at fixed prices. | 8:35 | |
On the contrary, if they can get them at today's prices, | 8:37 | |
which it can't, it probably | 8:40 | |
should apprehend such commitments. | 8:42 | |
- | Good enough, and thanks to Mr. Taylor for his letter. | 8:45 |
Now, Mr. Thomas E. Keistecker | 8:47 | |
of Winnetka, Illinois writes as follows. | 8:49 | |
"Dear Dr. Friedman, you have made a recent reference | 8:52 | |
"to an autonomous velocity increase | 8:55 | |
"without a prior increase in the quantity of money | 8:58 | |
"that occurred at the time of the Korean War. | 9:01 | |
"Would you point out examples in the past, if they do exist, | 9:04 | |
"of autonomous decreases in the velocity | 9:08 | |
"without prior decreases in the quantity of money? | 9:11 | |
"In view of the University of Michigan's | 9:14 | |
"Survey Research Center's Index of Consumer Sentiment | 9:17 | |
"being most pessimistic, what are your estimates | 9:20 | |
"of such an autonomous decrease | 9:22 | |
"occurring in the immediate future, | 9:25 | |
"and with what near-term and longer-term effect?" | 9:27 | |
- | That's, again, also a very penetrating question. | 9:31 |
The Korean War autonomous velocity increase | 9:35 | |
was easy to understand at that time. | 9:39 | |
It was just shortly after the end of World War II | 9:41 | |
after the price-controlled experience of World War II | 9:44 | |
and the jump in prices immediately afterwards. | 9:47 | |
And you could thus understand | 9:51 | |
that fearful of further price controls, | 9:52 | |
fearful of further price increases, | 9:55 | |
and fearful of the unavailability of goods, | 9:58 | |
people wanted to get out of money into goods. | 10:00 | |
Now the other kind of move, autonomous decrease in velocity, | 10:04 | |
I cannot think of any example that is as dramatic | 10:10 | |
and as long-continued as the Korean velocity increase. | 10:13 | |
However, you have had almost invariably | 10:18 | |
an autonomous velocity decrease | 10:22 | |
whenever uncertainty increases by a large amount. | 10:24 | |
The most dramatic examples of that are the outbreaks of war. | 10:28 | |
In 1914 when World War I broke out, | 10:32 | |
and again in 1939 when World War II broke out, | 10:36 | |
most people would anticipate, | 10:41 | |
looking back, you'd say, "Well everybody knows | 10:43 | |
"that wartime is gonna be a period of inflation. | 10:45 | |
"The stock market price rises and so on." | 10:47 | |
And yet the outstanding feature | 10:49 | |
of the first couple of months of both of those wars | 10:51 | |
was that stock prices fell, | 10:54 | |
that the prices of commodities fell. | 10:56 | |
And the explanation that has generally been given for that | 10:58 | |
is that the increased uncertainty at that time, | 11:01 | |
raised by the war - | 11:06 | |
nobody could know exactly what was going to happen, | 11:07 | |
what goods were gonna be available, | 11:09 | |
how they were gonna be available, and so on - | 11:10 | |
led people to want to be more liquid, | 11:13 | |
to have their cash balances higher. | 11:15 | |
And this was an autonomous decrease in velocity. | 11:17 | |
Again, exactly the same thing happened in 1971 | 11:20 | |
when Mr. Nixon imposed price and wage controls. | 11:25 | |
All of a sudden, people- | 11:28 | |
That case, prices and wages were frozen, you will recall, | 11:29 | |
for a 60 or a 90-day period, I've forgotten which. | 11:34 | |
And people at that time were very uncertain | 11:36 | |
about what would happen. | 11:38 | |
And as a result, if you look at the statistics, | 11:41 | |
you will find there was an autonomous velocity decrease. | 11:43 | |
It was not very large. | 11:47 | |
I once estimated it at that time as being about 2%. | 11:48 | |
But it was very obvious. | 11:51 | |
The later price control moves, | 11:55 | |
when a second round of price controls was imposed, | 12:00 | |
did not have the same effect because by that time, | 12:03 | |
people had come to recognize that price control | 12:05 | |
was going to be followed by inflation rather than deflation, | 12:09 | |
rather than to table prices. | 12:13 | |
And so you had two offsetting forces, | 12:15 | |
one of which was uncertainty, which would decrease velocity, | 12:16 | |
the other of which was fear of higher prices, | 12:20 | |
which would increase velocity. | 12:23 | |
As of the present time, it's not clear | 12:24 | |
that pessimism, per se, will decrease velocity. | 12:28 | |
What will decrease velocity is uncertainty, | 12:34 | |
which leads you to want to be more liquid | 12:37 | |
and to hold a larger amount of cash. | 12:39 | |
And to some extent, that always happens during a recession. | 12:41 | |
I am distinguishing at the moment | 12:45 | |
these autonomous velocity decreases and increases, | 12:46 | |
which come out of some unexpected event, | 12:49 | |
from the typical cyclical pattern of velocity. | 12:53 | |
As a standard matter, during an expansion, | 12:55 | |
velocity tends to increase. | 12:58 | |
During a contraction, velocity tends to decrease, | 12:59 | |
and that decrease tends to reflect | 13:02 | |
this kind of pessimism and uncertainty | 13:04 | |
that always goes along with recession. | 13:06 | |
And to some extent, that is happening now, | 13:10 | |
and velocity is decreasing somewhat now. | 13:13 | |
However, only to a very small extent | 13:15 | |
if you look at M2 velocity. | 13:18 | |
That's been extraordinarily stable. | 13:20 | |
- | Thank you very much. | 13:22 |
That also was a good letter. | 13:24 | |
We haven't discussed the oil situation | 13:26 | |
on these tapes for a while, Milton. | 13:29 | |
Thinking back to some of our comments of a year or so ago, | 13:30 | |
the oil cartel has been remarkably durable, | 13:34 | |
and some people have been surprised at its durability. | 13:38 | |
Recently we have been reading some articles | 13:42 | |
suggesting that maybe there's going to be | 13:44 | |
a crack showing up in the cartel. | 13:46 | |
I wonder what your observations are at this point. | 13:48 | |
- | Well, it's a funny thing about the way in which | 13:53 |
these reports that you're referring to go. | 13:55 | |
There seems to be a tendency for the media to swing | 14:00 | |
wholly one way or wholly the other way. | 14:04 | |
Somehow or other, you never have | 14:06 | |
just one paper bringing out a story. | 14:08 | |
They all bring them out. | 14:09 | |
As a veteran of the newspaper business, | 14:11 | |
you know about that better than I do, though. | 14:13 | |
But in this case, for about a year, | 14:16 | |
the only thing you could read in the newspapers | 14:20 | |
was that the oil cartel was here and with us forever | 14:22 | |
and that the higher prices of oil | 14:25 | |
were inevitably going to last | 14:27 | |
and that the newfound cohesion of the OPEC countries | 14:29 | |
was a permanent thing, and so on. | 14:33 | |
Now as you quite properly say, | 14:36 | |
when the oil embargo occurred in October of 1973, | 14:39 | |
I expressed the view, both in these tapes and also in print, | 14:44 | |
that the cartel would break down. | 14:49 | |
And that was based on the experience | 14:51 | |
of similar cartels in the past, | 14:54 | |
the coffee cartel, tin cartel, rubber cartel. | 14:56 | |
We have no end of past experiences of cartels. | 14:59 | |
And I could see no reason why this cartel | 15:04 | |
was fundamentally and basically different from others. | 15:06 | |
The reasons why cartels tend to break down are very simple. | 15:09 | |
They really have to do with the elementary proposition | 15:14 | |
that people can adjust better to unexpected change | 15:19 | |
the more time they have to adjust to it. | 15:22 | |
That's a very simple proposition, | 15:25 | |
yet it's a very fundamental proposition. | 15:26 | |
Let the price of something like oil be raised sharply, | 15:29 | |
let the production of it be curtailed somewhat, | 15:34 | |
and immediately it's very hard for people to adjust to it. | 15:37 | |
It takes a very high increase in price | 15:40 | |
to get people to conserve enough | 15:43 | |
to meet the reduction in the quantity produced. | 15:45 | |
But give them time, and all sorts of changes happen. | 15:48 | |
People can shift the kind of cars they drive. | 15:53 | |
They can shift their habits. | 15:54 | |
They can shift where they live. | 15:56 | |
They can move to different fuels, different energy sources. | 15:57 | |
And on the other side of the picture, | 16:00 | |
there is a great incentive for people | 16:02 | |
to find alternative sources, substitutes for oil, | 16:04 | |
whether it be- | 16:08 | |
or rather for OPEC oil, | 16:09 | |
whether it be oil produced elsewhere | 16:12 | |
or whether it be alternative sources of energy or what. | 16:13 | |
And in my opinion, that was the reason why, | 16:18 | |
in my opinion, the cartel was doomed to break, | 16:21 | |
because as these longer-term adjustments take form, | 16:25 | |
they inevitably produce friction within the cartel. | 16:29 | |
They require that to maintain the price, | 16:33 | |
you have to have a reduction in production. | 16:36 | |
So long as most of the cartel members | 16:39 | |
can sell all they produce at these high prices, | 16:41 | |
everybody is happy. | 16:44 | |
But as soon as you have to start reducing it, | 16:45 | |
the question is, who should reduce it? | 16:47 | |
But having said that, I must go on and say | 16:51 | |
that I was wrong in my estimate | 16:54 | |
of the length of time it would take. | 16:58 | |
As of October 1973, I would've predicted and did predict | 17:00 | |
that by this time, close to a year and a half later, | 17:03 | |
the cartel would not only be showing signs of cracking. | 17:08 | |
It would've cracked. | 17:10 | |
And so I have been puzzled as to why | 17:12 | |
the cartel has been as successful as it has. | 17:16 | |
Most cartels have not been able to last that long. | 17:20 | |
I think there are several factors that explain | 17:23 | |
the relative success of the cartel. | 17:25 | |
First, the cartel did consist of two groups. | 17:29 | |
The one outer group, Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, etc., | 17:35 | |
countries that did take advantage of the cartel | 17:43 | |
and the higher price to produce all-out | 17:48 | |
and get the higher prices. | 17:50 | |
Then the inner group of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi. | 17:52 | |
These are fundamentally- | 17:57 | |
Algeria, to some extent. | 17:59 | |
These are fundamentally the countries | 18:00 | |
which took the bulk of the pressure to reduce output. | 18:02 | |
And they were in a peculiarly favorable position to do so | 18:09 | |
compared to most cartels in the past, for several reasons, | 18:12 | |
one of which was that none of these are democracies. | 18:17 | |
They all are in the hands of a small number of oligarchs | 18:20 | |
who are really running the thing. | 18:23 | |
The second is, they have relatively small populations, | 18:25 | |
so that the enormous increase in their incomes | 18:28 | |
left them simply with funds to invest. | 18:32 | |
It was not used for current needs, | 18:37 | |
unlike the case of some of the others. | 18:39 | |
As a result, they were in a position | 18:42 | |
where they could sustain fairly large declines in output. | 18:45 | |
The most recent issue of Newsweek has an interesting chart | 18:55 | |
which documents the kind of statement I have been making. | 18:59 | |
That chart shows output in relation to potential. | 19:03 | |
And if you look at that, you will see | 19:08 | |
that the biggest cuts in that have been | 19:09 | |
the cuts by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Libya, and Abu Dhabi, | 19:12 | |
the countries that I have been referring to | 19:17 | |
as being in this position. | 19:18 | |
And in some of those cases, the cuts are really dramatic. | 19:21 | |
For Libya, they're down to less than | 19:23 | |
a third of their potential. | 19:25 | |
For Kuwait, it's roughly a half. | 19:27 | |
For Abu Dhabi, it's less than a half. | 19:29 | |
For Saudi Arabia, it's about three-quarters. | 19:32 | |
Now, those are very substantial cuts in production. | 19:37 | |
On the other hand, if you look at Iran, | 19:41 | |
its output has been cut only about 10%. | 19:44 | |
Venezuela about 10%, Nigeria about the same, | 19:47 | |
Algerian hardly at all. | 19:51 | |
Those outer countries have sort of been getting the gravy | 19:53 | |
while the inner countries have been bearing the burden. | 19:57 | |
A second factor, I think, which contributed | 20:01 | |
to the long period during which the cartel was successful | 20:03 | |
was our own foolish policies. | 20:06 | |
The United States, instead of following the sensible policy | 20:11 | |
of letting market rates rise to whatever they would | 20:16 | |
and giving incentive for domestic production, | 20:18 | |
has followed the policy of letting the price rise | 20:22 | |
to a considerable extent, but at the same time | 20:24 | |
discouraging domestic production | 20:26 | |
by having a price ceiling of $5.50 on old oil | 20:29 | |
and a price ceiling of 25 cents on old gas, | 20:33 | |
50 cents on new natural gas. | 20:39 | |
The result of this has been that there has been | 20:41 | |
an actual decline in the production | 20:43 | |
of oil in the United States. | 20:45 | |
We are now importing a million barrels a day more | 20:47 | |
from abroad than we were before, | 20:49 | |
so that we have really been acting | 20:52 | |
as if we were paid agents of the OPEC cartel. | 20:53 | |
And I believe that has contributed a fair amount | 20:58 | |
to the maintenance of demand for Arab oil. | 21:00 | |
As an aside on this, it is an example, | 21:08 | |
one of these examples of terrible economics, | 21:11 | |
the way in which people react to these kinds of things. | 21:14 | |
There's a egressions law that cheap money | 21:18 | |
drives out dear money, and there's also what I think is | 21:20 | |
a law of economic journalism that bad economics drives out | 21:22 | |
good economics. | 21:25 | |
(laughs) | ||
Your own paper, the Chicago Tribune, had a headline | 21:27 | |
the other day about Plan to Raise Oil Prices. | 21:30 | |
And what it consisted of was Ford's proposal | 21:34 | |
to eliminate the ceiling on the price of old oil. | 21:36 | |
- | I noticed that. | 21:39 |
- | Now, eliminating that ceiling would surely | 21:40 |
lower the price to you and me. | 21:42 | |
It wouldn't raise it. | 21:43 | |
If you eliminate the ceiling on old oil, | 21:45 | |
that's surely going to make for | 21:47 | |
a larger amount of oil produced, not a smaller. | 21:48 | |
How are you going to have a larger amount of oil | 21:50 | |
sold at a higher price? | 21:53 | |
Where is anybody gonna buy it? | 21:55 | |
Right now you don't have any rationing. | 21:56 | |
Markets are clearing. | 21:58 | |
There are no lines at the gas stations. | 22:00 | |
And therefore, the effect of removing | 22:01 | |
the ceiling on the price old oil | 22:04 | |
would be to raise the price of old oil, | 22:07 | |
but what it would do would be to eliminate the wedge | 22:10 | |
between the $5.50 for old oil | 22:12 | |
and the $10 or $11 for new oil, | 22:14 | |
which some middleman somewhere or other | 22:16 | |
is being able to rake in. | 22:18 | |
He's the one who would be hurt. | 22:19 | |
The producers of old oil would have an incentive | 22:21 | |
to exploit their wealth more fully and to get more old oil. | 22:24 | |
The consumers like you and me, we would have more oil to buy | 22:27 | |
and therefore the price would go down. | 22:30 | |
And you would have a further continuation of the pressure | 22:32 | |
which you now have on all gasoline stations to sell off. | 22:34 | |
Well, going back to the general situation, | 22:37 | |
while I was wrong about the timing | 22:40 | |
and it has taken longer than I expected, | 22:43 | |
it now has really begun to bear. | 22:46 | |
And now you've had all the news media | 22:47 | |
suddenly switch to the other side, | 22:50 | |
and not only the Wall Street Journal, | 22:51 | |
but also the Newsweek and everybody else | 22:52 | |
has been having stories about | 22:54 | |
the cartel is showing signs of breaking. | 22:55 | |
One thing about that, that we should learn | 22:59 | |
from past experience, is that once a cartel starts to break, | 23:04 | |
it often happens very, very fast. | 23:07 | |
And the reason for that is straightforward. | 23:10 | |
As time goes on, these adjustments | 23:13 | |
become larger and larger on the part of other people, | 23:14 | |
and you have the- | 23:17 | |
both in demand and supply. | 23:18 | |
In addition to which, the more the countries cut, | 23:21 | |
the further cut that is required | 23:25 | |
for a given decline in world demand. | 23:28 | |
If I'm producing 100 units and world demand | 23:30 | |
goes down by 10, I have to cut my output by 10%. | 23:33 | |
But if I'm producing 50 units and world ouput | 23:36 | |
goes down by 10, I have to cut by 20%. | 23:39 | |
And therefore it's always much harder | 23:43 | |
to achieve the further cuts in production | 23:46 | |
that are needed to maintain the price of oil. | 23:48 | |
Another factor, as I mentioned, | 23:51 | |
is the increasing effect of further discoveries. | 23:53 | |
I'm told that in the year and a half since the embargo, | 23:58 | |
the amount of new oil discovered in the world, | 24:02 | |
in Mexico and Indonesia, off the China Sea, | 24:05 | |
in the North Sea, and so on, | 24:08 | |
discovered outside OPEC countries | 24:11 | |
and outside of the US continental, United States, | 24:14 | |
that that new oil discovered amounts, in reserves, | 24:17 | |
to the same amount as total US continental reserves. | 24:21 | |
So in one year, we've added that much | 24:24 | |
to the world's known reserves. | 24:26 | |
And consequently that's going to come on stream. | 24:28 | |
It takes time before it dissolves, | 24:31 | |
so that I think we can look forward confidently | 24:33 | |
to a real break and a real destruction of that oil cartel. | 24:36 | |
In view of my past experience, I hesitate | 24:40 | |
to stick my neck out | 24:42 | |
(laughing) | ||
by giving a time span. | 24:43 | |
But yet, it's inconceivable to me | 24:45 | |
that by this time next year (laughs), | 24:47 | |
that won't be a thing of the past. | 24:49 | |
- | Thank you very much, Dr. Friedman. | 24:56 |
May I remind you, subscribers, if you would like to suggest | 24:58 | |
questions for Dr. Friedman to answer | 25:01 | |
or subjects for him to discuss on future tapes, | 25:03 | |
please write your suggestions to | 25:06 | |
Instructional Dynamics Incorporated, | 25:08 | |
450 East Ohio Street, Chicago, Illinois 60611. | 25:11 | |
We'll be talking with Dr. Friedman | 25:17 | |
again two weeks hence. | 25:19 | |
- | All right, we've gone up a thousand. | 25:22 |
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