Dr. Jim Willie: Watch the Rise of the US Dollar, then the Demise of the US Dollar
BY VOICE OF REASON
THELASTGREATSTAND.COM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 12TH, 2016
In the video below, Elijah Johnson asks Dr. Jim Willie if the dismantling of the Petrodollar machinery that Dr. Willie talks about so often will have any effect on the economic reset talked about in the post titled, Jim Willie: U.S. Dollar is Now a Matter of National Security Due to Poor Decisions, and if so, what will it be?
Dr. Willie responds by explaining that what he is referring to when he talks about the “Petrodollar machinery,” is the oil derivatives contracts. Derivative contracts for oil are more or less a mechanism to link the U.S. Dollar, British Pound, crude oil, and all kinds of other financial assets together, and the result is the contractual equivalent of the gold standard as applied to the crude oil asset. In essence, what derivative contracts did, was make the de facto oil involved in the contracts what was REALLY backing the U.S. Dollar. It could be argued that the U.S. Dollar is a fiat currency, and therefore has no backing, and while that would “technically” be true, for all “practical” intents and purposes oil was indeed what was backing the U.S. Dollar.
Because of their extreme complexity, oil contract derivatives don’t dismantle easily, and it doesn’t help when there are trillions of dollars tied up in oil contracts amounting to a total of roughly 25% more than there was in 2008 when world financial markets crashed. Since the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1971, and for all “practical” purposes adopted the Petrodollar de facto standard in 1973, the arrangement the U.S. has had with Saudi Arabia and all the Arab Emirates, is that our middle eastern partners agreed to take all crude oil sales, all crude oil payments, and all Petro surpluses in U.S. Dollars, and then they agreed to hold them in U.S.Treasuries for their savings. Until about two years ago, there was never discussion of, nor a problem involving the subsequent sale of the Treasuries after crude oil sales.
The Rest…HERE
