The Null Device

Arab street to US: keep your lousy dollars

Some have argued that one of the reasons for invading Iraq was to stop Saddam Hussein's spiteful attempt to start selling Iraqi oil for euros rather than dollars, and thus to shore up the dollar's God-given manifest destiny. If so, it may have backfired.

There are 3 comments on "Arab street to US: keep your lousy dollars":

Posted by: Ben B http://rocknerd.org Tue Apr 22 23:41:16 2003

Indonesia is already considering dumping the dollar for the euro:



Tokyo, April 17 (Bloomberg) -- Pertamina, Indonesia's state oil company, dropped a bombshell recently. It's considering dropping the U.S. dollar for the euro in its oil and gas trades.

http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&cid=pesek&sid=anZbHuX9q8gI

Note that there are extremely sound economic reasons to do this - the dollar is unstable and possibly overvalued.

Iraq switched to euros quite a while before the invasion; in fact, they made a handy windfall profit

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Wed Apr 23 03:11:46 2003

Time to invade Indonesia then. Or maybe they can handball this to Deputy Johnny. If Uncle George asks him nicely, he'd be more than happy to send the ANZACs in to Indonesia.

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Wed Apr 23 03:13:05 2003

Meanwhile, Malaysia is thinking of establishing a "pan-Islamic gold dinar" for trading in the Islamic world. Or rather adopting one; there's an existing online implementation at http://www.e-dinar.com/

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