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The petrodollar is a weapon, that’s it.

The US forced oil producing countries to sell their oil in USD, and when those countries that formed a cartel called OPEC tried to use those dollar earnings to industrialize themselves, the US said, no, you’re not allowed to purchase critical assets within the US shores, you’re only allowed to use them to purchase US weapons and treasury bonds (i.e. you sell oil, we give you junk papers).

That’s it. It allows the US to control global oil (energy) trade but the oil producing countries get junk papers in return. By stop selling oil in dollars, it simply allows those countries to stop accumulating junk papers. It doesn’t stop the US to continue to control the global oil trade with all the institutions it has already set up all over the world, and especially with the US itself being one of the largest oil producing countries in the world.

There has been so much myth about the petrodollar but the key point really boils down to: the US prints its own currency, its spending doesn’t need to be financed by the treasury bonds. When the US spends overseas, foreign central banks that earned the dollars cannot buy anything the US doesn’t allow, so they recycled those dollars back to the US as treasury bonds, which allows the US to control the amount of circulating dollars overseas (i.e. allowing it to spend even more money overseas since all the surplus dollars have been absorbed back to the US treasury). This is the secret behind the US getting “free ride” all across the world.

Crank “anti-globalists” love this petrodollar myth because they think they can somehow de-throne the dollar with cryptocurrencies or the gold, without even understanding how the global financial system works.