Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crises

Mahmoud A. El-Gamal, Ph.D., is Chair of the Department of Economics and Professor of Economics and Statistics at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he also holds the endowed Chair in Islamic Economics, Finance, and Management. Before joining Rice in 1998, he was an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He has also worked as an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester and the California Institute of Technology. During 1995¿6, he worked as an economist in the Middle East Department of the International Monetary Fund. During the second half of 2004, he served as scholar in residence on Islamic finance at the U.S. Department of Treasury. He has published extensively in the areas of econometrics, economic dynamics, financial economics, economics of the Middle East, and the economic analysis of Islamic law. His most recent book was Islamic Finance: Law, Economics, and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

This book explains the links between past and present oil crises, financial crises, and geopolitical conflicts.

1. The challenges of resource curses and globalization; 2. New Middle East: childhood 1973¿84 and adolescence 1985¿95; 3. Road to the status quo: 1996¿2008; 4. Globalization of Middle East dynamics; 5. Dollars and debt: the end of the dollar era?; 6. Motivations to attack or abandon the dollar; 7. Resource curses, global volatility, and crises; 8. Ameliorating the cycle; Conclusion.