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Comment by eecc | Hacker News Reader

Can you provide an explanation to the petrodollar hypothesis debunking?

Indeed, I’ve anecdotally noticed that whenever a dictator trading oil threatens to switch to another currency he ends up dead in a ditch.

On the contrary, dictators that do insist on $$$ and use them to enthusiastically buy US weapons are celebrated and given honor seats.

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That's because dictators who are well on their way to end up in a ditch usually start embracing "anti-imperialist" rhetoric to paint their opposition as being western traitors and legitimize their struggle for power. They dont just wake up and decide to ditch the dollar, it's just a convenient talking point that really seems to attract a huge portion of western sympathy. It switches the narrative from a revolution caused by brutal oppression to a "revolution" caused by US economic interest trying to topple a resistance leader or whatever.

I'm not saying the US doesn't usually have a lot to do with their demise, but simply that their fall isn't caused by moving from the petrodollars. Because it literally does not make any economic difference for the US , at all.

The difference between "This is the only currency that matters" and "You can do these transactions in any currency and it doesn't matter" is critical politically.

Currencies trade confidence, not fundamentals, and if confidence in a currency disappears to the point where it stops being the default choice for transactions, the effects are almost literally incalculable.

Short term trades can go up or down within a range bound by fundamentals. The further things get from their ‘correct’ value the more obvious the correlation becomes.

Aka, when people change their vacation plans etc based on currency fluctuations that’s a massive effect in aggregate.

Some of those dictators are even allowed to murder American journalists with no repercussions

You say journalist, I say imperialist spy. The line is blurred more and more these days, especially given the CFR's influence over American/Western media.

Please provide context on the imperial spy claim. I am guessing you and parent are referring to Khashoggi.

Try to look at this from the perspective of a country whose resources you are trying to protect from non-local usurpation by global Western organisations:

https://www.cfr.org/localjournalists

And no, I was referring to the spies posing as journalists in Venezuela, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, and so on. This is most definitely a rabbit hole any enlightened western observer of world affairs should go down.

I don't understand anything of what you are implying nor does that link provide any information (at least to me).

The question is, putting people to death for crimes against the state, i.e. death penalties, etc.

A lot of "states" murder "spies". [ * ]

The proposition was that only a select few states murder journalists for such crimes. Journalism is the opposite of spy craft, so combining them for political purposes is deadly, indeed.

It should be stated up front that I, personally, don't think the state should have the right to murder anyone, and I also mean by means of war, asymmetric or otherwise.

( * -The moment someone murders in the name of the state, the state is over and its time for a new one.)

Similarly, I have heared that the main cause of Irak war was that Sadam Hussein wanted to sell oil in euro.

Or Muammar Khdaffi's idea of the gold dinar (African currency with a 1:1 gold equivalent) supposed to be the future standard to express oil prices.

https://millenium-state.com/blog/2019/05/03/the-dinar-gold-t...

It seems unlikely that horror at the invasion of Kuwait, and concerns that Iraq might annex the Saudi oil fields were all just pretend. Certainly the Saudis didn’t seem to be pretending to be worried.

I could make a fair moral case for invading anywhere bigger than the mini-states like Switzerland.

Are there any countries in the Middle East where there isn't a good justified reason to invade them? I can think of reasonable reasons to invade Israel, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Pakistan. Some of those reasons have actually been used.

Similarly I can think of great justifications for an invasion of China, North Korea, Russia, pretty much all of Africa, the United States (they have a substantial amount of blood on their hands!).

Europe I personally struggle to think of dirt on in the last 50 years, South America I don't know much about. Most of South East Asian nations seem pretty well behaved to me which makes them a global rarity.

The fact that the US invaded somewhere where there were real reasons for concern is nice, but as far as I can tell that would be true of any invasion of any country short of sending the troops into Canada or re-invading Germany. In the Middle East it doesn't really mean much.

No, you really couldn’t. You could come up with all sorts of reasons for disliking them, or wanting to harm them, but that’s not the same as a reason for expending the huge economic, military and human cost of invading them. To invade a country you have to be willing to pay the price of doing it. Nobody has a good reason to want to pay the price of invading Pakistan. Not even India.

That could change, sure, but that’s not the situation as it stands, and if you can’t see how that works, I’m not sure how I can help you get there.

Well I know tensions have risen with regards to Iran but they recently signed a deal with China to trade oil in Yuan.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/09/20/chinas-400bn...

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