♲ @strangerthanfiction@diaspora.glasswings.com:
I periodically get pushback on "petrodollars"... they are real, and we are boned #ThanksNixon
Iran, the $39 trillion national debt and dedollarization: How Trump exposed America's Achilles Heel | Fortune
The year was 1974 and President Richard Nixon had dispatched his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Saudi Arabia to strike a secret deal. Three years earlier, in August 1971, Nixon had already administered the “shock” that ended the Bretton Woods system governing global finance since World War II — suspending the dollar’s convertibility to gold in a televised address that transformed every major currency overnight. By 1973, the system had fully unraveled.The world wouldn’t know for another 50 years what Nixon and Kissinger replaced it with, striking a deal that would quietly govern the global economy for the next half-century. Riyadh agreed to price and trade its oil in U.S. dollars and channel its petroleum windfalls back into U.S. Treasury bonds; in return, Washington promised military aid, equipment, and security guarantees—a deal that would quietly govern the global economy for the next half-century.
The existence of this secret agreement wasn’t even publicly confirmed until 2016, when Bloomberg News filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Archives.
fortune.com/2026/03/24/iran-ho…backup: archive.ph/unQtb
