Gold Oil Dollars Russia and China: The Death of the Petro-Dollar
- Gold Oil Dollars Russia and China: The Death of the Petro-Dollar
by , https://journal-neo.org/
The 1944 Bretton Woods international monetary system as it has developed to the present is become, honestly said, the greatest hindrance to world peace and prosperity. Now China, increasingly backed by Russia—the two great Eurasian nations—are taking decisive steps to create a very viable alternative to the tyranny of the US dollar over the world trade and finance. Wall Street and Washington are not amused, but they are powerless to stop it.
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Shortly before the end of the Second World War, the US Government, advised by the major international banks of Wall Street, drafted what many mistakenly believe was a new gold standard. In truth, it was a dollar standard in which every other member currency of the International Monetary Fund countries fixed the value of their currency to the dollar. In turn, the US dollar was fixed then to gold at a value equal to 1/35th of an ounce of gold. At the time Washington and Wall Street could impose such a system as the Federal Reserve held some 75% of all world monetary gold as a consequence of the war and related developments. Bretton Woods established the dollar which then became the reserve currency of world trade held by central banks.
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Death Agony of a Defective Dollar Standard
By the end of the 1960’s with soaring US Federal budget deficits from costs of the Vietnam War and other foolish spending, the dollar standard began to show its deep structural flaws. A recovered Western Europe and Japan no longer needed billions of US dollars for financing reconstruction. Germany and Japan had become world class export economies with higher efficiency than US manufacturing owing to a growing obsolescence of US basic industry from steel to autos and basic infrastructure. Washington should then have significantly devalued the dollar against gold in order to correct the growing world trade imbalance. Such a dollar devaluation would have boosted US manufacturing export earnings and reduced the trade imbalances. It would have been a huge pus for the real US economy. However for Wall Street banks it spelled huge losses. So instead, the Johnson and then Nixon administrations printed more dollars and in effect exported inflation to the world.
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The central banks of especially France and Germany reacted to the deafness in Washington by demanding US Federal Reserve gold for their US dollar reserves at $35 per unce s in the Bretton Woods 1944 agreement. By August 1971 the redemption of gold for inflated US dollars had reached a crisis point where Nixon was advised by a senior Treasury official, Paul Volcker, to rip up the Bretton Woods system.
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By 1973 gold was allowed by Washington to trade freely and was no longer the backing of a sound US dollar. Instead, an engineered oil price shock in October 1973 that sent the dollar price of oil higher by 400% in a matter of months, created what Henry Kissinger then called the petrodollar.
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