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Monday, March 09, 2026

9: Middle East

Oil Crises, Past and Possibly Future What the 70s can and can’t teach us ............ In October 1973, on Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement — Syria and Egypt launched a surprise attack on Israel. After desperate fighting, the Israelis gained the upper hand, thanks in part to a huge airlift of weapons from the United States.......... The Arab world erupted in rage, and oil producers temporarily embargoed exports to the U.S. and other nations that had supported Israel. The result was the first of a series of oil crises that wreaked global economic havoc. ............. oil experts’ hair is on fire — the Strait of Hormuz is closed! — while macroeconomists are relatively calm, arguing that we’re not as vulnerable to an oil shock as we were two generations ago. ............. The disruption of world oil supplies caused by the war in Iran looks extremely serious. Indeed, if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for an extended period, this will be a worse disruption than either the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War or the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian revolution.