The Attack on the U.S. Dollar and Energy Needs

By Alan Caruba
Mar 20, 2006

It's bad enough that the Middle East has us over a barrel of oil thanks to our continued dependency on access to its huge reservoirs of crude, but largely unknown to most Americans, the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) and the Islamic Development Bank have a long-term goal of replacing the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency for world trade.

In March the Iranians will open an Iran Oil Bourse that will trade oil and products in the Euro, not the dollar. They will not be alone in pegging their nation's currency to the Euro. Syria already does and Venezuela, another major oil producer, has announced plans to do so as well.

As David J. Jonsson, the author of "Clash of Ideologies", pointed out in a recent article, the United States "relies on approximately 70 percent of all foreign-exchange currency to be held in dollars because we sell Treasury debt into that foreign-exchange market." A flight of foreign-exchange reserves away from the dollar would depress its value and, conversely potentially increase the value of the Euro by 20 to 40 percent.

This is extremely bad news for the United States and for the West in general. While Americans focus on the shooting war in Iraq, we are in an even more serious economic war with an axis that spreads from South America to the Middle East. Bear in mind that many South American nations have been electing Socialist governments and that some Middle Eastern nations have flirted with socialism for decades. The Baathist Party in Saddam"s Iraq is an example of this.

Calls for oil independence in the U.S. have been largely ignored for the three decades we have known about the vast reserves in Alaska"s ANWR or those trapped in shale in Utah and Colorado. Congress has blocked ANWR drilling and in known offshore reserves despite the increasingly volatile Middle Eastern situation.

The economy of the United States is, in many ways, quite fragile. Just how broke is America?

http://www.michnews.com/artman/publish/printer_12166.shtml

dp

Syria has not 'pegged its currency to the Euro', and neither Iran or Venezuela are planning to do so.



Venezuela is not about to peg its currency to the Euro either; it has transferred some reserves to European banks, which is a different thing. If Iran did set up a market trading oil in euros (which won't happen until mid 2006 at the earliest), that wouldn't mean the Iranian currency is pegged to the Euro - any more than the oil market in London, which trades in dollars, impleis that the pound is pegged to the dollar. This guy is out of his depth, and floundering badly.

michnews.com is a far right website, containing, for instance, an article today calling the Democratic party 'traitors in our midst' and 'mentally unstable'. Do we really have to post screeds from it here?

Undermining it it with every bill the GOP passes, and every embezzling Pioneer who funded the "elections" and every policy applied by the BushCo regime.

I seem to recall the news in the past month speculating about the upcoming Iranian Oil Bourse. Sometime around the present date to be implemented, etc.

So, did a google search today for the latest on Iran Oil Bourse. Maybe one or two hits, then went to read one, and reloaded the search, and this link started showing up. Checked out a few and realized they were all right-wing sites, but another hour later, many more RW sites are picking it up...

now, you may choose not to be inundated with RW sites 'news' and i agree, i didn't see this as 'news' but an editorial, so posted as such. But it's what's out there, like it or not, instead of any REAL news about the situation ... which is sad since this topic ought to be focused on, imo, as to implications about supposed upcoming attacks on Iran and their mythical WMDs, etc.

my 2 cents.
dp

From the Toronto Globe and Mail, 14th March, so it ought to be fairly reliable:

It's become another buzzword like "Communist" in the 60's. At the time (yes, I'm old) probably not one American in a hundred could describe what Communism actually meant or who Lenin and Marx were.

Or what?

we'll be the last to know.

dp