The Death-Defying Dollar?
by ilene - October 25th, 2009 3:01 pm
The Death-Defying Dollar?
Courtesy of Leo Kolivakis at Pension Pulse
Not a day goes by where I don’t hear or read something on the U.S. dollar’s demise. Today I received an email from Penguin Group promoting Charles Goyette’s new book, The Dollar Meltdown. Mr. Goyette also wrote an article for The Street.com, They’re Destroying the Dollar.
Now, I have not read Mr. Goyette’s book, but this isn’t the first book predicting the doom of the U.S. dollar, nor will it be the last. One of my favorite books on the U.S. dollar was written by Richard Duncan back in 2003, The Dollar Crisis. He might have been a little early, but Mr. Duncan described the economic ills plaguing the U.S. economy and how it will impact the greenback.
More recently, William Engdahl wrote an article on his site, Collapse of the Greenback? Will the Dollar get an "Arab oil Shock"?:
Ever since Washington tore up the Bretton Woods treaty in August 1971 and went onto a “dollar paper reserve system” instead of a dollar backed by gold, the United States, as the world’s most powerful military power, has been able to dictate financial terms to the world. Nations like Japan and later China, dependent on US export markets, would dutifully invest their trade surplus dollars into US Government debt, in effect financing wars such as Iraq or Afghanistan they opposed. They saw no choice. Arab oil producing countries, under US military pressure, were forced to sell oil only in dollars, a direct prop to the dollar when the US economy was in terminal decline. That may be rapidly about to come to an end.
According to a leaked report from Arab Gulf oil producers, there have been a series of secret meetings in recent months between the major Arab oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, and reportedly also Russia, together with the leading oil consumer countries including two of the three largest oil import countries, China and Japan.
Their project is to quietly create the basis to end a 65-year long “iron rule” of selling oil only in US dollars. As I document in my book, Century of War, following the 400% oil price shock of 1973, which was deliberately blamed by US media on “greedy Arab Sheikhs,” the US