Sunday, September 14, 2008

Oil Panic in the 1920's

In "The Wages of Destruction", Tooze discusses that IG Farben invested heavily in synthetic oil production in the early 1920's as it was believed that the world was running out of oil. By the end of the decade large discoveries had been made in Texas, Venezuela and Mexico that offset the declining production in Europe and Eastern America. Sounds familiar doesn't it?

Anyway, IG Farben did OK as Hitler and his economic minions forced the coal industry to subsidize synthetic oil production as a path to war.

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