1. How the petrodollar was born
Since in 1971 President Richard Nixon dissociated the gold from
dollar, that currency was left without any real, material support, and became
simply a fiduciary instrument, that is, a currency sustained only in the good
faith of the one who issues it. and who accepts it as a value and means of
payment. But President Nixon, to compensate for this weakness, reached an
agreement with Saudi Arabia so that from that moment all operations derived
from the purchase and sale of oil in the world would be made in the currency of
the United States, the dollar. Thus arose what in the modern world is known as
the petrodollar.
Then, after the first big increase in oil prices in 1974 and
as a result of the Arab oil embargo, oil countries began to receive huge
amounts of dollars. Impacted by this sudden wealth, the oil countries did not
settle for what they obtained at the beginning and start to produce oil in
quantities far above the needs of their economies to obtain more money; this
led to the surplus of petrodollars. This new mass of money came in the form of
new investments in the economy of the United States and other nations, while
the physical surplus of oil was distributed in the markets and allowed some
countries such as the United States and Japan to create their Strategic Oil
Reserves.
2. The petrodollar as an instrument of International Reserves
of nations
The instruments of International Reserves recognized by the
International Monetary Fund are today gold, Special Drawing Rights of the IMF
and the dollar, euro, yen, pound sterling and yuan. But I think that countries
with the need to strengthen their international reserves can develop a new
international reserve instrument with oil by creating a Strategic Reserve in
physical, material form, whose monetary value is exclusively dedicated to
strengthening its International Reserves.
It is not, therefore, an oil to enter into the world market
of crude oil sales but a real, material guarantee of the International
Reserves, a real guarantee that must remain stored in special places as the
United States and Japan do, although that Storage has a cost that must be
financed. It should be noted that the President of the United States, Donald
Trump, has proposed selling half of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of the
United States (1) to strengthen the financial position of his country, a fact
that reveals and confirms the double function of the Reserve of Strategic
Petroleum of the United States: a) Its condition of material support to the
need for energy for any moment of crisis and b) Its capacity as a financial
instrument. It is necessary to say, in addition, that the Congress of the
United States since 2015 approved a measure that allows to sell part of that Reserve
(2)
3. Conclusion
Countries could use the monetary value of oil, stored in
physical form, as an instrument to strengthen their International Reserves. (3)
(*) The author, Pablo Rafael Gonzalez, is a Latin
American writer and researcher in the fields of philosophy, politics and
economics
Entradas
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario