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In News of Warring Clans, Prynne was writing a satirical fragmentary epic about the consciousness of conspirators, economic elites who identify themselves as a racial group, whose political ties are hidden and who, since the writing of Wound Response, seem to have evolved and secured their seizure of power and wealth. The cause of the shift in Prynne’s poetry was a set of developments that can now be seen as key moments in the beginnings of neoliberalism, developments which clearly sunk deeply into his poetry. Though it was not part of my earlier description of neoliberal- ism, oil was a central commodity in the origins of the new economic order, putting more and more wealth into New York banks and increasing their capacity to open up and control new markets. OPEC, the Organis- ation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, through the oil embargo of 1973–74 against states that had supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War, dramatically increased their profits in exporting oil – and the price that countries such as the USA had to pay for oil.42 This was the largest nonviolent redistribution of wealth in history and in its aftermath the US government used military pressure to recycle much of this wealth through New York investment banks.43 The banks then used this money to ‘prise open new investment opportunities and protect their foreign operations’: they lent to foreign governments and promoted the deregulation of international credit and global financial markets, which the US government in turn supported. According to Judith Stein, this con- tributed to the outsourcing of manufacturing and to the greater and greater turn to finance in the US economy, as the banks were invested in outsourcing production to developing nations, in order that these countries could repay their loans.44 Prynne, at the least, could see the cen- trality of developments in the oil trade to something going on in capital- ism. But while oil permeates the background, at the centre of News of Warring Clans is a highly ironic representation of what Harvey would much later call ‘the financialisation of everything’.45 Prynne writes in one passage: