Interesting stuff over on Stratfor about the “Geopolitics of $130 oil.”
The short story is: The U.S. is hit, but not too hard, given its transition from manufacturing to services. China gets the worst of it by far — it lives by manufacturing but it’s forced to hold prices down to avoid unrest, so it’s “squeezing profits out of exports.” Russia’s stock is way, way up, as it’s sitting on big reserves of both oil and gas and foreign currency. Saudi Arabia is sitting pretty, and may actually become a force for peace (or at least stabilization) in the region to preserve its catseat. Iraq may calm down to focus attention on getting oil going, and Iran is kicking itself for letting its oil assets degrade — it too may need to seek peace with the West. Relative to this unfolding dynamic, international terrorism is not particularly significant.
There you have it.
