OPEC, war in the desert and bicycles in Bali

… It was in 1980 and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries was at its cryptic best in those days. Even the Delphic oracle must have blushed. Yet the deemed marker was the device they employed to ratchet up the oil price to a 20th century record that


OPEC dictated the price in those days. There was no free market. Oil ministers in their hotel suite cabals held the world to ransom.

Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the urbane Saudi Arabian minister, famously sighed once as he entered a hotel lobby for another OPEC session: