Presidents' Day Poll

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Babette

Although, he was president that hot summer Ubergeek & I had to sit in long gas lines with the black vinyl seats. Was that Carter's fault or economic backlash from Ford or even Nixon?

Neither oil crisis had much to do with who was president at the time.

The 1973 oil crisis was a real oil shortage and came about because of the Yom Kippur War between Israel and the surrounding Arab worlds. As punishment, the Arab nations cut off oil exports to countries that had supported Israel (initially just the U.S. and the Netherlands since Arabs particularly hate country names that contain "the" but it slowly expanded to others).

The 1979 crisis (the one you remember) was more ephemeral since actual oil supply only fell a little bit after the Iranian Revolution. But there was a market panic.