Bernard Munk received his PhD and MA in economics and a BA in history at the University of Chicago, USA. He founded several production and trading companies for agricultural and meat products and then migrated to the petroleum industry. By means of a leveraged buyout, he and his partner acquired a large petroleum terminal and a pipeline management company and began a fuel oil distribution company serving east coast utilities in the late 1980s and after selling this company to a NYSE company, in 1992 he became an adjunct Professor of Management at the Wharton School initiating a core curriculum course in Geopolitics. He then formed a financial advisory company providing consulting services to investment banks. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia where he has written and spoken on economic policy and energy policy. He has published in academic and trade journals and for a number of years maintained a blog at www.ecomentary.com that will resume shortly following publication of this book.