571–580 of 750 posts
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I think the initial crack was ousting Maduro in Venezuela. Since OPEC exempts Venezuela from production caps, it gives the US government a lever on non US production.
2017 when Venezuela accepted RMB for oil and then USDT crypto. USDT is being used to skirt the US's control of the oil and bypassing the dollar. The ships passing through the straight now are also paying Iran in RMB and crypto. The petrodollar is the objective. This isn't over any time soon
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> Asian countries in particular are going to burn They won't sit still, though. Eventually, if this were tried, we'd see Chinese-flagged tankers buying passage rights from Iran and being escorted by PLAN ships. No way does Commander TACO take that shot. The US interdiction threat in the gulf is empty, and everyone know it. Iran gets paid at the end of every story. The whole boondoggle has been a failure for the US in…
I suspect USN commanders have been ordered to leave Chinese flagged tankers well alone, even in the absence of a PLAN escort.
This is the US trying to salvage the petrodollar. They want those t-bills and oil priced in dollars to maintain reserve currency status, but the whole world is divesting anyway. UAE is hoping that by leaving OPEC they can continue to do business and get protection from US. But US isn't gonna risk a larger war just to defend UAE, US has plenty of oil to exploit in Venezuela and at home. So UAE is just kinda screwed, a…
I’ve developed a simple heuristic: If someone unironically invokes petrodollar as an explanation for anything in 2026, they’re probably not worth taking seriously.
https://www.ft.com/content/be345914-7b4b-4264-bcbd-6e5e33b79...
I am personally convinced that there are many more people pretending to understand geopolitics than people who actually understand. It could be that no one truly understands due to the amount of fractal complexity and emergence.
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The very short explanation is that they kind of want to be not-Saud and has trouble cooperating with Saudi Arabia for a rather long time, not just over fossil fuels but also in Yemen. Recently the UAE faction in Yemen was forcefully reined in by the house of Saud, and OPEC kind of prioritises different things than the UAE, i.e. not pushing profits hard in the short to medium term instead focusing on stability and pre…
Didn’t we see reports that Saudi Arabia was supporting and pushing Israel and U.S. to attack Iran?
It all depends on how Saudi wants to be seen in the moment and what Trump thinks makes him look better in the moment.
But like, Saudi gave Americans golden planes and extraordinary amount of bribes, so one would assume they were buying something.
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Best of luck! These proxy wars have existed since the days of Assyria. 3000 years and running. Kind of depressing thought actually.
Lots of things have existed throughout history, yet we have overcome them in the last few hundred years. There is peace in Europe (west of Russia) which had as ancient conflict as Yemen; there is democracy, freedom, women have equal rights in much of the world, starvation and many diseases are mostly overcome, warfare is very rare and not an omnipresent threat, ... Thank goodness our predecessors didn't think this wa…
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Shouldn’t UAE be upset their entire economy has absolutely rammed by the war started by Israel? At least the Saudis have pipelines - UAE is fucked
UAE is the third largest producer in OPEC, and has options to avoid the straight, yet Their economy recently get shocked though by the war they wanted to avoid
> The UAE's exit from OPEC represents a win for U.S. President Donald Trump, who in a 2018 address to the U.N. General Assembly accused the organisation of "ripping off the rest of the world" by inflating oil prices. I can't see how it is actually a win for Trump. OPEC has mostly been a big partner with the US. They are the ones that have mandated using the dollar as the baseline currency for buying and selling OPEC…
> OPEC has mostly been a big partner with the US. They are the ones that have mandated using the dollar as the baseline currency for buying and selling OPEC oil. Has anyone ever quantified the benefit the U.S. supposedly gets from dollar denominated oil? How does that compare to the cost to the U.S. of paying cartel pricing for oil? Given that the U.S. is a huge oil consumer, surely the cost to it of cartel pricing i…
If there is benefit it is small. It is mostly symbolic - petrodolar is a symbol of a power and people react to it.
This is the US trying to salvage the petrodollar. They want those t-bills and oil priced in dollars to maintain reserve currency status, but the whole world is divesting anyway. UAE is hoping that by leaving OPEC they can continue to do business and get protection from US. But US isn't gonna risk a larger war just to defend UAE, US has plenty of oil to exploit in Venezuela and at home. So UAE is just kinda screwed, a…
Petrodollar discourse tends to annoy me because people tend to get cause and effect confused. The dollar isn't strong because oil is traded in it. Oil is traded in dollars because the dollar is strong. What makes the dollar strong? The US military and, at least up until now, the US essentially guaranteeing global maritime trade. Oh and the US also being the world's arms dealer. Why this is such a huge strategic blund…
> What makes the dollar strong? The US military
The US military and the dollar are strong because the US economy is strong.
This is the US trying to salvage the petrodollar. They want those t-bills and oil priced in dollars to maintain reserve currency status, but the whole world is divesting anyway. UAE is hoping that by leaving OPEC they can continue to do business and get protection from US. But US isn't gonna risk a larger war just to defend UAE, US has plenty of oil to exploit in Venezuela and at home. So UAE is just kinda screwed, a…
Coincidently, FTAV posted a good "petrodollar" article today for anyone interested (article is free but might need a free account to read it): https://www.ft.com/content/a65efb54-306b-49ad-9920-40d59b195...
I like this part:
> One big flaw in their argument is that the petrodollar isn’t nearly as big a factor in the global dollar ecosystem as it used to be
> A proper grasp of the events in question suggests that the ballyhoo over the petrodollar’s alleged imperilment will prove to be just the latest in a series of false alarms about the dollar’s status atop the world’s currency hierarchy.