Skip to main content

Marc Rich is in the news again




President Obama recently appointed a new White House counsel, W. Neil Eggleston.


This appointment did not require Senate confirmation, but it did kick up a bit of a fuss, and put the late financier Marc Rich back in the news. 


On his way out the White House door in January 2001, President Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, then a fugitive after criminal convictions under tax laws and the trading-with-the-enemy statute. Eggleston, portrayed here, had worked in the White House early in the Clinton administration but was back in the private sector while the Rich pardon was under consideration. He became involved in the fall-out from that pardon in a peripheral way.


I don't care about Eggleston, but the very idea of an Eggleston-Rich connection, and thus an Obama-Rich connection, has stirred up the usual hound dogs.


My own view of Rich, I have to say, is a fairly sympathetic one.


One of the connections that made it possible for Rich to create a spot market in physical oil in the 1970s -- thus making himself very "rich" indeed -- was his relationship with the government of Iran under the House of Pahlavi. Company co-founder Green spoke Farsi and was the company’s expert in Iranian matters. Through the early years of Rich + Co., the firm was buying 200,000 barrels a day.

They faced an obvious challenge, then, when Iran erupted in revolution in 1978-79. Their best contacts, such as Parviz Mina, the director of the National Iranian Oil Company, and Ali Rezai, a Senator and industrialist, had to leave the country like their Shah himself.

It was Rich’s response to that crisis that led in the end to his downfall, his long exile, and that infamous pardon. The new regime would take American hostages even as Marc Rich + Co. was working to develop new contacts in Iran, contacts that would preserve Iran as a source of supply for the spot market.

The new government there was run by people who may have known the Koran backwards and forwards, but didn't know the world oil markets, and who had driven out of town the employees of the Shah who had known that field. So they had to rely on a billionaire American Jew, Mr Rich, to show them the ropes.

Whatever else you may say about Rich, I think it clear that his creation of a spot market, in contrast tot he industry of vertically integrated corporate silos that had preceded that, was a step toward a healthier, more sustainable, world oil industry and for this Rich deserves some gratitude.


So I personally cannot hold this connection against Eggleston.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more