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Correct me if I'm wrong but the strategic petroleum reserve wasn't created until later on - I want to say around the time of the first Gulf war.

According to the website "Howstuffworks", "The United States started the petroleum reserve in 1975 after oil supplies were cut off during the 1973-74 oil embargo." I guess that makes both of us wrong because I thought it was started by Eisenhower.

3. No matter how well the FTC was run at that time, two branches of the government working at cross purposes still seems perfectly reasonable to me. I don't even know that it was the FTC that imposed the Nixonian wage and price controls or some other agency (a litttle research would resolve that problem I'm sure).

That two agencies will work at cross purposes today is "reasonable" to me, as well. It was less common at the time of the "oil embargo". The FTC did not impose Nixon's wage and price controls, that was all Tricky Dicky. The FTC primarily investigated consumer fraud (such as rat hide being sold as mink, or "oil embargos"). They also are (or were) the enforcers of the "Fair Credit Act".

4. It could be that there is some truth to both of our conclusions - it's not clear to me that they are really that mutually exclusive - the wage and price controls could have been a factor in the oil company's behavior just as your contention that they were trying to gin up a sense of crisis and make OPEC a political pinata. Great discussion - seems like there has not been enough of this sort of thing on FR lately.

Concur. Thanks for joining in with me.

The FTC did not impose Nixon's wage and price controls, that was all Tricky Dicky.

Sure Nixon "imposed" the controls but some Alphabet soup agency had to have implemented and enforced them - or so it would seem to me - maybe there was some "office of wage and price controls" at that time - I'll try to find out.

Thanks for your kind words.