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Soaring prices for crude oil, falling production surpluses, wild speculation in commodities, a rush into the precious metals, turmoil in the Middle East, assertive oil producers: it is 1973-74 all over again, and at dictation speed.

James Buchan

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James Buchan
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 11
Journalist
Novelist
James Ernest Buchan
Hon. James Ernest Buchan
Fall
Productions
Soar
Surpluses
Producers
Speculation
Dictation
Precious
Metals
Soaring
Falling
Prices
Commodities
Wild
Commodity
Assertive
Speed
Rush
Surplus
East
Oil
Turmoil
Middle
Production
Crude

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Saudi Arabia operates according to the belief that God made young men and women so utterly and completely without self-control that they must be physically segregated every moment of the day and night.
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Since the attack on the United States on September 11 2001, and the US retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, there must be few people who have not felt a twinge of nostalgia for the cold war.
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The dividing line between wish and need was never clear.
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Governments of rich countries spend some $6bn of tax money a year on disaster relief and development aid overseas, while each new earthquake, famine or tidal wave can attract 1,000 aid organisations, from the United Nations Children's Fund and Oxfam to the 'Jesus Brigades' of the American south and other charitable adventurers.
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Saudi Arabia is a puritanical state that claims a monopoly of wisdom and virtue.
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The world survived the fall of the Roman empire and will no doubt outlast our own so much more splendid civilisation.
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The truth is, of course, that history is not completed in modern commerce any more than philosophy is perfected in political economy. In other words, there is nothing timeless or God-given about filling stations and penicillin and plastic bags.
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If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.
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There are about 15 million Muslims in the EU. They face ignorance, insult and even persecution. They cannot be wished away. To impose Enlightenment freedoms is self-defeating. Anyway, the Muslims have their own enlightenment.
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Liberty in Islam is the liberty to be a Muslim, democracy likewise, individualism likewise.
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It is time to end the western policy of malign neglect. It is in the interest of the whole world to help tackle the actual grievances in Palestine, Kashmir, and in central and southern Iraq, and to help the region out of its economic backwardness.
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In rising financial markets, the world is forever new. The bull or optimist has no eyes for past or present, but only for the future, where streams of revenue play in his imagination.
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Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop.
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Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing.
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We generally write best of what we ourselves have seen.
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Life without oil, in fact, would be so different that it is frightening to contemplate. We are addicted, and it is no comfortable addiction.
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Viewed from a distance, or through the eye of the All-Knowing CEO of the Universe, the crash of 2008 followed the usual pattern. A long-lived boom driven by cheap credit, going back as far as 1982 (though subject to interruptions in the mid-1980s and 1990s, and in 2001), came to grief because of a rise in the cost of borrowing money.
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My belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences.
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A century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity today it is almost as vital to human existence as water.
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We read too much Shakespeare at school, and view our parliamentary politics as dynastic drama, in which an impatient crown prince frets at his long subordination and begins to scheme for the throne he knows he merits, was promised and has earned.
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