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plumpy nut
Joined: 12 Mar 2011
Posts: 1652
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 Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2015 11:26 pm Post subject: Saudi Arabia entering the next oil war phase |
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2015/11/10/saudi-arabia-preparing-to-fuel-its-100-billion-oil-war-with-debt/?utm_campaign=yahootix&partner=yahootix
Saudi Arabia is now relying on loans in their 100 billion dollar oil war with the USA. I wonder how long they can last? If their credit dries lots of luck to students getting extra pay added to their government welfare for joining up to take ESL programs. It could also have dire consequences for ESL professionals depending on ESL positions in the KSA especially direct hire positions.
Oil alone may not bring about a collapse of any sort. There are far more serious issues with their quasi wars with Iran (a more powerful country) and palace intrigue. Don't count on Saudi Arabia being a Pork Barrel country to teach in. Prospective ESL teachers should not rely on teaching in foreign countries anyway unless you're talking high quality International Schools. I don't think Saudi Arabia has any; Those schools have to be Western accredited you know. |
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nomad soul
Joined: 31 Jan 2010
Posts: 11454
Location: The real world
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| Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2015 11:34 pm Post subject: Re: Saudi Arabia entering the next oil war phase |
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| plumpy nut wrote: |
| It could also have dire consequences for ESL professionals depending on ESL positions in the KSA especially direct hire positions. |
"Dire consequences" such as... ? |
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buravirgil
Joined: 23 Jan 2014
Posts: 967
Location: Jiangxi Province, China
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| Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2015 12:58 am Post subject: Re: Saudi Arabia entering the next oil war phase |
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| plumpy nut wrote: |
| Saudi Arabia is now relying on loans in their 100 billion dollar oil war with the USA. |
There's a fair amount of cognitive dissonance among policy critics interpreting economic shifts as "war" within the parameters of defining KSA as a client state. In plainer words, KSA oil prices rarely make a majority of US policy makers unhappy and conflating terms of conflict (economic and military) is irresponsible and deliberatey provocative codswallup from financial market reporters.
This article addresses US Shale interests, concedes its existence is leveraged, and cites faltering share prices despite increasing efficiency to "report" KSA is, as well, engaging outside markets and financial instruments (bonds) to compete with US Shale, largely by maintaing low oil prices. The article only mentions KSA's "social contract" and asserts the supposedly common knowledge that KSA is "running out" of oil. The article concludes such a strategy is risky were oil prices to abruptly rise.
Oil prices will certainly rise as their relatively recent and precipitous fall came as a suprise to most investors and crippled Russia's cash surpluses. Cheap energy also did much to serve the concentration of wealth among the far upper percentiles. Any price below $50/barrel would likely require new laws of physics or extreme oversights of geological survey-- a science with no limits to its funding.
Leverage, as it's applied to contexts of debt, is a deceptively simple term because its practice is sufficiently complicated to produce speculative markets. What the KSA is doing is demonstrating a comprehension of markets beyond remaining simply a producer of a commodity. This, in and of itself, is indicative of more than one variable, one of which is most certainly "peak" production projections, but also indicates a conscious managment of what is a non-renewable source of energy. It's responsible, in a word. Not a "war".
Violent conflicts are another variable your post presents (Iran, versus the article's citation of Yemen) to again ignore the parameter of a client state and the consistently purchased military hardware that brings pensions to bankers in Connecticut and engineers and factory workers in California.
I'll echo what NomadSoul has, and more specifically question how any interpretation of the article might relate to "especially" direct hires or the moderate stipends extended to Saudi citizens. I mean, you might not be proven wrong, those stipends might end. But Saudi has never afforded the entitlement (guaranteed income) smaller OPEC nations have. Slacking them off wouldn't surprise me or prove any assertion made in your post or the article.
But I can agree the relatively large network of royal family abuses are not a neglible variable to the continued prosperity of Saudi. I know it to be poorly accounted and a treacherous blindspot for any regime. |
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sicklyman
Joined: 02 Feb 2013
Posts: 930
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| Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2015 9:31 am Post subject: |
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| nice to hear a cogent thought on here, let alone a whole string of them. |
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buravirgil
Joined: 23 Jan 2014
Posts: 967
Location: Jiangxi Province, China
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| Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2015 11:09 am Post subject: |
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You better not be pulling my leg...cogent is not an adjective of choice here lately. And wasn't I something of a prat to you? Asserting your posts tend to emphasize the Kingdom's less appealing attributes?
And then you're kind; Way to screw me up...cheers |
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scot47
Joined: 10 Jan 2003
Posts: 15343
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| Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2015 11:13 am Post subject: |
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| The preliminary phase of WW3 started some time ago. |
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buravirgil
Joined: 23 Jan 2014
Posts: 967
Location: Jiangxi Province, China
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| Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2015 12:18 pm Post subject: |
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| scot47 wrote: |
| The preliminary phase of WW3 started some time ago. |
OmG, i love it, i love it, i love IT.
Sometimes I'm astonished...that I've lived within a generation fascinated by apocalyptic fictions derived from an actual horror that ICBMs might fill an innocuous and blue sky...
...that now some three generations have not witnessed what two did, and in many cases a single lifetime engaged...a great war and a war to end all great wars...
...that Armistice Day, cynically appropriated by generals and renamed, is now appropriated by Alibaba and, in the name of commerce, called Single's Day upon which wholesalers shed inventory...
“History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” I dunno. It's an easy position to take. It's not apparent to many, but a populist memo out there is, The future is female. While some mythographers had already purported recorded history sprang from matrilineal heritage and dismissed heresy.
I'd mentioned in another thread vaguely conspiratorial notions and the Arab Spring. You know the middle east more than many, if not all, on this board. Did you see the networked cameras as cheap as transistor radios once were and content management as simple to fashion as a sandwich board that a globe can view...a village TV ushered, but a web tinkers and builds... Did you, could you, predict what stasis the middle east suffered would be included by the expansion of technology and not relegated by it?
There is far more money in developing economies of two and three dollars a day than the rarefied durable goods of developed countries in which two-car garages are complemented by Jet-Skis and Winnebagos. What does quality of life mean? You're telling me you poop in perfectly clean water?
When desalination and cheap electric power are achieved, what concern could raise armies blind to consumer markets of comfort-giving and entertainment? And what drives organized murder in the streets today? If past wars were about resources, what ideology calling for murder could prevail? |
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scot47
Joined: 10 Jan 2003
Posts: 15343
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| Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2015 1:53 pm Post subject: |
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Bura
You need to get out more. Chill - go and have a beer or a coffee or whatever you do in Cathay.
You think too much. |
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sicklyman
Joined: 02 Feb 2013
Posts: 930
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| Posted: Thu Nov 12, 2015 8:54 am Post subject: |
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so much for cogency  |
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pooroldedgar
Joined: 07 Oct 2010
Posts: 181
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| Posted: Sat Nov 14, 2015 2:30 pm Post subject: |
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Sometimes I'm astonished...that I've lived within a generation fascinated by apocalyptic fictions derived from an actual horror that ICBMs might fill an innocuous and blue sky...
I don't think anyone believes WW3 will involve much in the way of ICBMs. For a better picture of what it will include, please consult today's newspaper. |
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scot47
Joined: 10 Jan 2003
Posts: 15343
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| Posted: Sat Nov 14, 2015 3:15 pm Post subject: |
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Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s we had visions of it all ending with ICBMs or in the scenario of the novel/film "On the Beach"
Looks like it is winding down in different ways. "Heyho so it goes," as Kilgore used to say. |
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buravirgil
Joined: 23 Jan 2014
Posts: 967
Location: Jiangxi Province, China
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| Posted: Sat Nov 14, 2015 3:54 pm Post subject: |
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| pooroldedgar wrote: |
| I don't think anyone believes WW3 will involve much in the way of ICBMs. For a better picture of what it will include, please consult today's newspaper. |
Not since 9-11, no. Not since nuclear threat was expressed as WMDs in Iraq, no. Scot's post doesn't express WW3 is ongoing, but any configuration of national power is "preliminary" to another, similar cycle. I respect the perspective, but challenged the conclusion.
Equating transnational acts of terror to either world conflict of the previous century is oblivious to the magnitude of fatalities, casualties, and waste they wrought. Any sympathy for suffering is profoundly necessary, but casting any comparison is neither proportional nor necessary.
Yet I'm overwhelmed by feelings of dismay and anguish when I scan news feeds in which horror becomes so tightly sequenced as to eclipse another-- Beirut followed by Paris-- while a US state department avidly promotes "Jihad John's" unproven demise by drone as relevant and is merely emblematic of what plagues the present vocabulary to address the provocation of and protection from violence because, ultimately, all violence, by its nature, is senseless. |
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