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Comment by JumpCrisscross

5 days ago

> Perhaps Venezuela is just a reaction to the action that is already happening, namely a world-wide concerted effort to abandon the petrodollar…

The petrodollar hypothesis is obsolete. It has been since America became an oil exporter.

The way you're presenting it, it's never been the case. Petrodollars let America finance a massive military. The military gives it power. We aren't sanctioning Venezuela into submission. We're bombing it.

Also, oil has been traded in non-dollars for ages. I've personaly done it at a bank trading desk in Connecticut.

What, per your reckoning, is the petrodollar hypothesis?

I see it as the world starting to become very unwilling to trade anything at all with the US, and moving to other currencies and finance systems for trade and economic transfer.

  • > What, per your reckoning, is the petrodollar hypothesis?

    Petrodollar recycling [1] backed by U.S. military might. It was a way, in the 1970s and 80s, for us to secure our oil supplies by e.g. guaranteeing the security of the House of Saud.

    The point was securing oil. The dollar benefits were a side effect. The dollar is ascendant because we're massive consumers.

    > I see it as the world starting to become very unwilling to trade anything at all with the US

    This has nothing to do with the petrodollar!

    > moving to other currencies and finance systems for trade and economic transfer

    Sure. Folks talk about this. It has nothing to do with Venezuela. (Again, oil is traded in multiple currencies and has been for at least two decades.)

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar_recycling

    • The dollar is ascendant because the rest of the world is forced to use it for trading purposes, under threat of military incursions or other forms of massive civil undoing, courtesy of the American MIC.

      And the point is, the American consumer market means less and less to a world that is sick and tired of the suffering the American people bring to it.

      >two decades

      Yes, that’s the point, the world is moving off the US Dollar as a global currency, and this is why America needs more endless, endless war, and its why we have endless, endless war. The rest of the world sees this all too clearly now.