meehawl

all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned

It’s All About the Euros

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So David sent me this sweet little summary of the currency co
nspi
racy theory
 about why — in the face of a staggering lack of “evidence” f
or a
causus belli and astonishgly high levels of domestic dissent and anti-war support — the Bush Gang is so eager to topple Saddam and why “old Europe” is so eager for this not to happen. In 2000 Iraq switched from US Dollars to EU Euros as its oil currency, effectively enlarging the Euro asset base considerably. Apparently, Iran is also considering switching from $ to ?. Although the dollar has already depreciated by nearly 20% against the Euro over the past year or so, if Iran and other OPEQ countries switch to Euro-denominated oil, then this would immediately cause a huge asset deflation of the Dollar. This in turn could lead to non-oil assets being withdrawn from dollar denomination and switched to Euros. A depreciation of around 50% would not be unusual — indeed UK Sterling suffered a sequence of more rapid and massive jolts in the decades after WW2 as the American Empire replaced the British Empire and the Dollar replaced Sterling as the currency of trade.

So in geopolitical terms it’s necessary for the US to very publicly, very visibly put the Big Smackdown on the first client oil state to make a clean break from US monetary hegemony. And it also explains why the Germans and French, never previously really noted for their humanitarian concerns (think of Germany/Balkans and France/Rwanda/IvoryCoast most recently), suddenly seem to be coming over like choirboys. And of course the UK, possessing the only major European currency outside the Euro monetary system and intimately tied to the US Dollar (because of its oil production and investment links), and Tony Blair are the only significant Powers supporting Bush’s preemptive attack.

I note in closing that one other significant country recently decided to switch from Dollars to Euros for oil trading: North Korea (2002-12-7). If Iran does switch then the entire Axis of Evil is now backing the Euro system, which should give those Treaty-Of-Rome-Antichrist-Mark-Of-The-Beast Nuts something to chew on.

The effect of an OPEC switch to the euro would be that oil-consuming nations would have to flush dollars out of their (central bank) reserve funds and replace these with euros. The dollar would crash anywhere from 20-40% in value and the consequences would be those one could expect from any currency collapse and massive inflation (think Argentina currency crisis, for example). You’d have foreign funds stream out of the U.S. stock markets and dollar denominated assets, there’d surely be a run on the banks much like the 1930s, the current account deficit would become unserviceable, the budget deficit would go into default, and so on. Your basic 3rd world economic crisis scenario.

The United States economy is intimately tied to the dollar’s role as reserve currency. This doesn’t mean that the U.S. couldn’t function otherwise, but that the transition would have to be gradual to avoid such dislocations (and the ultimate result of this would probably be the U.S. and the E.U. switching roles in the global economy).

It would appear that any attempt by OPEC member states in the Middle East or Latin America to transition to the euro as their oil transaction currency standard shall be met with either overt U.S. military actions or covert U.S. intelligence agency interventions. Under the guise of the perpetual “war on terror” the Bush administration is manipulating the American people about the unspoken but very real macroeconomic reasons for this upcoming war with Iraq. This war in Iraq will have nothing to with any threat from Saddam’s old WMD program. This war will be over the global currency of oil.

3 Responses

  1. mike says:
    2003-02-02 at 10:11:12

    Currency trasnformations are more like catastrophe events than the gradual calculus favoured by economists. Look at Argentina as an example of how quickly things can go south. And the cool thing about the EUro is that huge changes *can* be made overnight — EMU proved that. THe UK pooh-poohed it but most of the countries in Europe were able to change their entire currency systems over in two major singularity-speciific events: 1999 when the back-end switched, and 2001, when the cash-based economies switched. After preparing for half a decade by programming their financial systems to handle such a huge transformation, the Euro Central Bank is now leagues ahead of the US in terms of dynamic adaptability.

  2. Elvis Presley says:
    2003-02-04 at 10:11:12

    The Arab economies are small. In total, they amount to no more than a tiny fraction of the European Community or United States. The GDP of all the Arab states combined (based sometimes on overvalued official exchange rates) is estimated around $380 billion, or roughly that of Holland.

    The US has nothing to worry about, chicken little.

  3. mike says:
    2003-02-04 at 10:11:12

    It’s not the *size* of the Arab economies, it’s the multiplier effect of denominating oil transactions in dollars that counts. Why is this such a hard concept for so many people to grasp? “The economy” is one particular construct, “oil transactions” is another.

    Current Global oil production: 75 billion barrels:
    Current price range of oil: $25 – $30
    Mulitpled together (@ $25 barrel) = $1.875 trillion dollars
    Mulitpled together (@ $30 barrel) = $2.250 trillion dollars

    Look at the latest report from the Fed on US ForEx transactions…
    http://www.ny.frb.org/pihome/news/forex/2002/fxq202.pdf

    $25 in US fiat dollars per barrel x 56 billion barrels = $1.4 trillion “petro-dollars” or fiat oil currency dollars which are reinvested anually from OPEC back into T-Bills, and dollar denominated assets, etc.
    http://www.democraticunderground.com/duforum/DCForumID27/1641.html#1

    This dominance of the dollar is by no means assured, and I am pleasantly surprised to find that so many Americans find this concept absurd. The British were fond of saying that the sun could never set on their Empire. There is nothing the Chinese would like better than for the Yuan to become an international currency…

    “The post-World War II dominance of the United States (Pax Americana) has created the conditions for the U.S. dollar to become the dominant global money. It is no accident, for instance, that the U.S. dollar is used as the medium of exchange and unit of account in most international oil transactions. During the heyday of the British Empire, the British pound sterling was the dominant global money.”

    http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/sgabriel/economics/china-essays/10.html

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