i politely asked you for your opinion on certain sources that i was unsure about but you deleted it without any comment why njgw the nixon administration decided to try to ensure that international financial relations should be taken out of the control of state central banks and should be increasingly centred upon private financial operators it sought to achieve this goal through exploiting us control over international oil supplies it is still widely believed that the sharp and steep increase in oil prices in was carried out by the gulf states as part of an anti israel and anti us policy connected to the yom kippur war yet as we now know the oil price rises were the result of us influence on the oil states and they were arranged in part as an exercise in economic statecraft directed against america s allies in western europe and japan and another dimension of the nixon administration s policy on oil price rises was to give a new role through them to the us private banks in international financial relations the nixon administration was planning to get opec to greatly increase its oil prices a full two years before opec did so and as early as the nixon administration planned for the us private banks to recycle the petrodollars when opec finally did take us advice and jack up oil prices the nixon administration understood the way in which the us state could use expanding private financial markets as a political multiplier of the impact of us treasury moves with the dollar but according to the nixon s ambassador in saudi arabia at the time the principal political objective behind nixon s drive for the opec oil price rise was to deal a crippling blow to the japanese and european economies both overwhelmingly dependent on middle east oil rather than to decisively transform international financial affairs nevertheless nixon s officials showed far more strategic insight into the consequences of what they were attempting than most political scientists would credit any government with its capacity for deception both over the oil price rise and in the way in which it manipulated discussions with its allies in the imf over so called international monetary reform was brilliant the us government realised that the oil price rises would produce an enormous increase in the dollar earnings of oil states that could not absorb such funds into their own productive sectors at the same time the oil price rises would plunge very many states into serious trade deficits as the costs of their oil imports soared so the so called petrodollars would have to be recycled from the gulf through the western banking systems to non oil producing states other governments had wanted the petrodollars to be recycled through the imf but the us rejected this insisting the atlantic world s private banks at that time led by american banks should be the recycling vehicles and because the us was politically dominant in the gulf it could get its way the globalization gamble the dollar wall street regime and its consequences by peter gowan 'i am per cent sure that the americans were behind the increase in the price of oil sheikh yamani former saudi oil minister v h oppenheim why oil prices go up the past we pushed them foreign policy winter since the united states has encouraged middle east oil producing states to raise the price of oil and keep it up years of censored news why oil prices go up while most americans believe the increase in oil prices was due to the arab oil embargo started in few are aware that their elected representatives collaborated with the organization of petroleum exporting countries opec and persian oil producing nations to deliberately inflate the price of oil kissinger's yom kippur oil shock