Democratic Underground - Petrodollars vs. the OPEC Euro. An oil currency war

Petrodollars vs. the OPEC Euro. An oil currency war. News totally suppressed in the US.

Notice that none of the oil-producing countries get on our blacklist until they indicate that they're going to move to the Euro. Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela are prime examples. This is the reason the EU isn't bombarding Iraq right along with us. Their governments aren't any more moral than ours despite the grand gesticulating. They willingly, happily went to Gulf War I but now that the Euro is in stiff competition with the dollar, ah now that's a different story.

We lose. There's no way we can win this thing. A graceful transition is what was called for... an acceptance that all empires must end but instead we went to war in a mad dash to save a worthless dollar that depends being the dominating currency of OPEC for its survival.

During all of this hypocritical fun, as you watch the New World being ordered, arranged before your very eyes, they can't agree on who gets what because the neocons never had any intention of divvying it up equally with the other first world powers - hence all of the internal squabbling and old soul-gazing buddies now becoming bitter enemies.

This is why with few exceptions Democrats voted for this war and the party establishment would only support & accept candidates who were for it. This is why the anti-war Left needs to be purged- we stand in their dreams of raising the empire back up on the back of innocent people.

And you can't blame it all on Bush. Saddaam was convincing the other OPEC nations to move to the Euro and this is the main reason Clinton bombed the hell out of him.

Hope that isn't overly simplistic.

That's my take on it...
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SADDAM'S UNFORGIVABLE SIN
Iraq has been accused of many crimes, but topping the list is the unforgivable sin of trading oil for Euros instead of American Dollars.

The dollar is the world reserve currency. This gives a huge subsidy to the US economy because if a country wants to hold lots of dollars in reserve they must supply the US with goods and services in return for those dollars. In return the US creates a bit more credit. The more dollars there are circulating outside the US, the more goods and services the US has imported virtually for free. This is how the US manages to run a huge trade deficit year after year without apparently any major economic consequences. No other country can run such a large trade deficit with impunity. It is in effect getting a massive interest-free loan from the rest of the world.

One of Europe's primary objectives, if not the primary objective, of setting up the Euro was to try and get some of this free lunch for Europe. If the Euro became a major reserve currency, or better still replaced the dollar as the major reserve currency, then Europe too could get something for nothing.

This would be a disaster for the US. Not only would they lose their subsidy, which has been increasing in size and in importance to American economic well being as the years have gone by, but countries switching to Euro reserves from dollar reserves would start spending their dollars in the US. In other words the US would have to start paying its debts to other countries. As countries converted their dollar assets into Euro assets the US property and stock market bubbles would, without doubt, burst. The Federal Reserve would no longer be able to print more money to reflate the bubble as it is currently openly considering doing, There is, however, one major obstacle to this happening: OIL! Oil is of course by far the most important commodity traded internationally, and if you want to buy oil on the international markets you usually have to have dollars.

Until recently all OPEC countries agreed to sell their oil for dollars only. This meant that oil importing countries, like Japan, needed to hold dollar reserves in order to be able to buy oil. So long as this remained the case, the Euro was unlikely to become the major reserve currency. There is not a lot of point to stockpiling Euros if every time you need to buy oil you have to change them into dollars. But in November 2000 Iraq switched to the euro, with potentially perilous consequences for the US. Only one country has the right to print dollars: the US! If OPEC were to decide to accept euros only for its oil, then American economic dominance would be over. Not only would Europe not need dollars anymore, but Japan which imports over 80% of its oil from the Middle East would have to convert most of its dollar assets to Euro assets (Japan is of course the major subsidiser of the US). The US on the other hand, being the world's largest oil importer would have to acquire Euro reserves, i.e. it would have to run a trade surplus. The conversion from trade deficit to trade surplus would have to be done at a time when its property and stock market prices were collapsing and its own oil supplies were contracting. It would be a very painful conversion; potentially disastrous.

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Speaking to British MPs, Prime Minister Tony Blair was just as explicit: "Let me deal with the conspiracy theory idea that this is somehow to do with oil. There is no way whatever if oil were the issue that it would not be infinitely simpler to cut a deal with Saddam...." (London Times 1/15/03).

(snip)

... the need to dominate oil from Iraq is also deeply intertwined with the defense of the dollar. Its current strength is supported by OPEC's requirement (secured by a secret agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia) that all OPEC oil sales be denominated in dollars. This requirement is currently threatened by the desire of some OPEC countries to allow OPEC oil sales to be paid in euros.

(snip)

The chief reason why dollars are more than pieces of green paper is that countries all over the world need them for purchases, principally of oil. This requires them in addition to maintain dollar reserves to protect their own currency; and these reserves, when invested, help maintain the current high levels of the US securities markets.

As Henry Liu has written vividly in the online Asian Times (4/11/02),

"World trade is now a game in which the US produces dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy. The world's interlinked economies no longer trade to capture a comparative advantage; they compete in exports to capture needed dollars to service dollar-denominated foreign debts and to accumulate dollar reserves to sustain the exchange value of their domestic currencies. To prevent speculative and manipulative attacks on their currencies, the world's central banks must acquire and hold dollar reserves in corresponding amounts to their currencies in circulation. The higher the market pressure to devalue a particular currency, the more dollar reserves its central bank must hold. This creates a built-in support for a strong dollar that in turn forces the world's central banks to acquire and hold more dollar reserves, making it stronger. This phenomenon is known as dollar hegemony, which is created by the geopolitically constructed peculiarity that critical commodities, most notably oil, are denominated in dollars. Everyone accepts dollars because dollars can buy oil. The recycling of petro-dollars is the price the US has extracted from oil-producing countries for US tolerance of the oil-exporting cartel since 1973.

(snip)

The Unstated US Goal of Preserving Dollar Hegemony Against Competition from the Euro

As noted in a recent article by W. Clark, "The Real But Unspoken Reasons for the Iraq War", the OPEC underpinning for the US dollar has shown signs of erosion in recent years. Iraq was one of the first OPEC countries, in 2000, to convert its reserves from dollars to euros. At the time a commentator for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty predicted that Saddam's political act "will cost Iraq millions in lost revenue." In fact Iraq has profited handsomely from the 17 percent gain in the value of the euro against the dollar in that time.

Other countries have gradually been climbing on to the euro bandwagon. An article in the Iran Financial News, 8/25/02, revealed that more than half of Iran's Forex Reserve Fund assets had been converted from dollars to euros. In 2002 China began diversifying its currency reserves away from dollars into euros. According to Business Week (2/17/03) Russia's Central Bank in the past year has doubled its euro holdings to 20 percent of its $48 billion foreign exchange reserves. And for a very good reason, according to its First Deputy Chairman Oleg Vyugin: "Returns on dollar instruments are very low now. Other currency instruments pay more."

(snip)

If not deterred, OPEC could follow suit. Libya has been urging for some time that oil be priced in euros rather than dollars. Javad Yarjani, an Iranian senior OPEC official, told a European Union seminar in April 2002 that, despite the problems raised by such a conversion, "I believe that OPEC will not discount entirely the possibility of adopting euro pricing and payments in the future."

Meanwhile Hugo Chavez has been taking Venezuelan oil out of the petrodollar economy by bartering oil directly for commodities from thirteen other third world countries. Although this has not yet qualified Venezuela for official membership in Bush's "axis of evil," the heavy hand of the Bush Administration in the recent coup attempt against Chavez was only too obvious. (See "Venezuela Coup Linked to Bush Team," London Observer, 4/21/02, for details about the roles of US officials Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich, and John Negroponte.)

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/iraq.html

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Ari Fleischer Press Briefing of February 6, 2003:

Q Since you speak for the President, we have no access to him, can you categorically deny that the United States will take over the oil fields when we win this war? Which is apparently obvious and you're on your way and I don't think you doubt your victory. Oil -- is it about oil?

MR. FLEISCHER: Helen, as I've told you many times, if this had anything to do with oil, the position of the United States would be to lift the sanctions so the oil could flow. This is not about that. This is about saving lives by protecting the American people....

Q There are reports that we've divided up the oil already, divvied it up with the Russians and French and so forth. Isn't that true?....

MR. FLEISCHER: No, there's no truth to that, that we would divide up the oil fields.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030206-13.html

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An extremely interesting news item last October in Alexander's oilandgas.com revealed that the US was planning not only for the post-war exploitation of Iraq's oil reserves, but for Iraq's relationship to OPEC as well:

"Oil firms wait as Iraq crisis unfolds"

unless France, Russia and China support the U.S. line in the Security Council, their oil companies may find themselves blacklisted.

the true issue here is not just access to Iraq oil, but control over it

reminds us

If Iraq were able to reenter the international oil market, the Chronicle reported, "it would devalue British North Sea oil, undermine American oil production and---much more important---it would destroy the huge profits which the United States (read, US oil companies) stands to gain from its massive investment in Caucasian oil production, especially in Azerbaijan.

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