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Originally Posted by pHaestus
credit cards are all maxed out Joe; no more wars for the near future.
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Originally Posted by Joe
But when you have the treasury right accross the river... why not just print some more. Teh US dollar is worth close to toilet paper now anyway, so why not just go all out!
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Let's turn that around. OPEC prices oil in US dollars. Not yen not euro, just US dollars exclusively by special arrangement with the Saudi royals. Everyone who wants to buy oil accepts the unlimited printing of US dollars (debt) because the whole world uses that currency for the big commodity, oil. So long as foreigners trade in US dollars to buy oil, Americans may live in debt at least equal to that external oil trading plus dollar reserves amassed by every responsible government (uh, or something like that).
Now consider what should happen to a major oil producing regime that suddenly declares the US dollar "enemy currency" and accepts
euros as payment , even exchanges the dollars in its oil-for-food account for euros, making an easy profit instantly? What if a chorus of murmurs rose up from other OPEC countries, and this causes the dollar to fuctuate wildly? What happened was sudden and swift. Iraq's oil ministry was the real target of regime change. The strategic enemy was the euro as contender to hegimon currency.
Euro will take dollar's place, I think. It's just a question of doing this nice and slow or in a panic.
North Korea can't touch the US economy. Venezuela can. Iran can. OPEC itself can. This has nothing to do with the supply of oil to America for consumption, or the price at the pump, but it really is all about oil.