The MR Podcast–Oil Shocks, Price Controls and War

 [[{“value”:”Our second podcast on the 1970s titled Oil Shocks, Price Controls and War is now available! Here’s one bit: Tabarrok: …Sheikh Ahmed Yamani, in a famous statement, he was the oil minister for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he’s a leader of OPEC, he says on October 16th, this is 10 days after the war
The post The MR Podcast–Oil Shocks, Price Controls and War appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.”}]] 

Our second podcast on the 1970s titled Oil Shocks, Price Controls and War is now available! Here’s one bit:

Tabarrok: …Sheikh Ahmed Yamani, in a famous statement, he was the oil minister for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he’s a leader of OPEC, he says on October 16th, this is 10 days after the war begins, “This is a moment for which I have been waiting for a long time. The moment has come. We are masters of our own commodity.” They raise the price of oil. Oil production falls by about 9 percent to 10 percent. That doesn’t seem on the surface to be a huge amount, but it reveals something which people had not been prepared for, and that was the inelasticity of oil demand.

I would put it this way. I think this is the key idea here. Almost accidentally, the exporting countries had discovered that the demand for oil was more inelastic than anyone had ever realized. The main lesson they drew before 1973, the oil exporting countries thought that the only way to increase revenues was to produce more. After 1973, they learned that an even better way to increase revenues was to produce less.

Here’s another:

COWEN: Since the 1980s, economists, for a number of reasons, have underrated real shocks as a source of business cycles and downturns. You have the Keynesians who didn’t want to talk about it, and then you had the Monetarists, Milton Friedman, who wanted to promote their own recipe, and people just stopped talking about it. Even 2008, which clearly had a lot to do with a major negative shock to aggregate demand, but the price of oil is quite high at the time when that’s breaking, and it was a major factor behind the downturn.

TABARROK: Absolutely.

COWEN: No one wants to talk about that.

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The post The MR Podcast–Oil Shocks, Price Controls and War appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

 Economics, History, Political Science, oil shock, the 1970s, Yom-Kippur war