Aggressive nationalization of large profitable companies seemed to be a thing of the past until Monday, when Argentina seized control of YPF, the former Argentine oil and gas monopoly, from Repsol, Spain’s own former oil and gas monopoly. Top executives were forced out of YPF’s headquarters in Buenos Aires as Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner announced that the government would take over 51 percent of YPF’s shares, a move that Repsol declared “manifestly unlawful and gravely discriminatory.”

The saga recalls the age of the oil shocks in the 1970s, when Saudi Arabia nationalized Saudi Aramco and other countries did the same with the Western companies that controlled the oil industry. More recently, BP was forced to abandon some