40 Year Old 1973 Petrodollar Agreement Between U.S. And Saudi Arabia No Longer Secret
Sep 20, 2019 02:54:37 #
The 40 Year Old Petrodollar Agreement Born In Secrecy Between The U.S. And Saudi Arabia In 1973
by Tyler Durden
Tuesday, 05/31/2016 - 14:32
For decades, the story of Saudi Arabia recycling petrodollars, i.e., funding the US deficit by buying US Treasuries with proceeds of its crude oil sales (mostly to the US), while the US sweetened the deal by providing the Saudis with military equipment and supplies, remained entirely in the conspiracy realm, with no confirmation or official statement from the US Treasury department.
Now, that particular "theory" becomes the latest fact, thanks to a fascinating story by Bloomberg which gives the background and details of secret meeting between then-US Treasury secretary William Simon and his deputy, Gerry Parsky, and members of the Saudi ruling elite, and lays out the history of how the petrodollar was born.
Here is the background:
It was July 1974. A steady predawn drizzle had given way to overcast skies when William Simon, newly appointed U.S. Treasury secretary, and his deputy, Gerry Parsky, stepped onto an 8 a.m. flight from Andrews Air Force Base. On board, the mood was tense. That year, the oil crisis had hit home. An embargo by OPEC’s Arab nations—payback for U.S. military aid to the Israelis during the Yom Kippur War—quadrupled oil prices. Inflation soared, the stock market crashed, and the U.S. economy was in a tailspin.
Officially, Simon’s two-week trip was billed as a tour of economic diplomacy across Europe and the Middle East, full of the customary meet-and-greets and evening banquets. But the real mission, kept in strict confidence within President Richard Nixon’s inner circle, would take place during a four-day layover in the coastal city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
The goal: neutralize crude oil as an economic weapon and find a way to persuade a hostile kingdom to finance America’s widening deficit with its newfound petrodollar wealth. And according to Parsky, President Nixon made clear there was simply no coming back empty-handed. Failure would not only jeopardize America’s financial health but could also give the Soviet Union an opening to make further inroads into the Arab world.
It “wasn’t a question of whether it could be done or it couldn’t be done,” said Parsky, 73, one of the few officials with Simon during the Saudi talks
As noted above, the framework of the required deal was simple: the U.S. would buy oil from Saudi Arabia and provide the kingdom military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance America’s spending.
The man leading the US negotiation, US Treasury Secretary William Simon, had just done a stint as Nixon’s energy czar, and "seemed ill-suited for such delicate diplomacy. Before being tapped by Nixon, the chain-smoking New Jersey native ran the vaunted Treasuries desk at Salomon Brothers. To career bureaucrats, the brash Wall Street bond trader—who once compared himself to Genghis Khan—had a temper and an outsize ego that was painfully out of step in Washington. Just a week before setting foot in Saudi Arabia, Simon publicly lambasted the Shah of Iran, a close regional ally at the time, calling him a “nut.”
But Simon, better than anyone else, understood the appeal of U.S. government debt and how to sell the Saudis on the idea that America was the safest place to park their petrodollars. With that knowledge, the administration hatched an unprecedented do-or-die plan that would come to influence just about every aspect of U.S.-Saudi relations over the next four decades (Simon died in 2000 at the age of 72).
In the beginning it wasn't easy: "it took several discreet follow-up meetings to iron out all the details, Parsky said."
But at the end of months of negotiations, Bloomberg writes, there remained one small, yet crucial, catch: King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud demanded the country’s Treasury purchases stay “strictly secret,” according to a diplomatic cable obtained by Bloomberg from the National Archives database."
The secret remains... until May 16, 2016, when the US Treasury for the first time ever revealed the full extent of Saudi TSY holdings.
Bloomberg adds that with a handful of Treasury and Federal Reserve officials, the secret was kept for more than four decades—until now. "In response to a Freedom-of-Information-Act request submitted by Bloomberg News, the Treasury broke out Saudi Arabia’s holdings for the first time this month after “concluding that it was consistent with transparency and the law to disclose the data,” according to spokeswoman Whitney Smith. The $117 billion trove makes the kingdom one of America’s largest foreign creditors."
The TIC data released later that day confirmed the FOIA response.
To be sure, as we commented in mid-May, it is very likely that the Treasury report is incomplete, and that the Saudis also own hundreds of billions in Treasurys held in custody with offshore trading centers such as Euroclear. After all, the current tally represents just 20 percent of its $587 billion of foreign reserves, well below the two-thirds that central banks typically keep in dollar assets.
What’s more, the commitment to the decades-old policy of “interdependence” between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, which arose from Simon’s debt deal and ultimately bound together two nations that share few common values, is showing signs of fraying. America has taken tentative steps toward a rapprochement with Iran, highlighted by President Barack Obama’s landmark nuclear deal last year. The U.S. shale boom has also made America far less reliant on Saudi oil.
Needless to say, the real total notional amount of Saudi holdings will eventually become known, especially if the middle-eastern nation follows through with its threat of liquidating some or all of them. What is more notable, however, is that with the first disclosure of this data since the birth of the petrodollar, something appears to have changed:
What’s more, the commitment to the decades-old policy of “interdependence” between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, which arose from Simon’s debt deal and ultimately bound together two nations that share few common values, is showing signs of fraying. America has taken tentative steps toward a rapprochement with Iran, highlighted by President Barack Obama’s landmark nuclear deal last year. The U.S. shale boom has also made America far less reliant on Saudi oil.
“Buying bonds and all that was a strategy to recycle petrodollars back into the U.S.,” said David Ottaway, a Middle East fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. But politically, “it’s always been an ambiguous, constrained relationship.”
One thing that certainly changed is that in a world where central banks are ravenously buying up each others' (and their own) debt, the need for Petrodollar recyclers such as Saudi Arabia is no longer there. But that was not always the case:
Back in 1974, forging that relationship (and the secrecy that it required) was a no-brainer, according to Parsky, who is now chairman of Aurora Capital Group, a private equity firm in Los Angeles. Many of America’s allies, including the U.K. and Japan, were also deeply dependent on Saudi oil and quietly vying to get the kingdom to reinvest money back into their own economies.
"Everyone—in the U.S., France, Britain, Japan—was trying to get their fingers in the Saudis’ pockets,” said Gordon S. Brown, an economic officer with the State Department at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh from 1976 to 1978. For the Saudis, politics played a big role in their insistence that all Treasury investments remain anonymous.
America's reliance on Saudi Arabia to fund its deficit - and obtain a cheap price for oil - meant that the kingdom would be granted Platinum status in every form of interaction with the US.
Tensions still flared 10 months after the Yom Kippur War, and throughout the Arab world, there was plenty of animosity toward the U.S. for its support of Israel. According to diplomatic cables, King Faisal’s biggest fear was the perception Saudi oil money would, “directly or indirectly,” end up in the hands of its biggest enemy in the form of additional U.S. assistance.
Treasury officials solved the dilemma by letting the Saudis in through the back door. In the first of many special arrangements, the U.S. allowed Saudi Arabia to bypass the normal competitive bidding process for buying Treasuries by creating “add-ons.” Those sales, which were excluded from the official auction totals, hid all traces of Saudi Arabia’s presence in the U.S. government debt market.
“When I arrived at the embassy, I was told by people there that this is Treasury’s business,” Brown said. “It was all handled very privately.”
Another exception was carved out for Saudi Arabia when the Treasury started releasing monthly country-by-country breakdowns of U.S. debt ownership. Instead of disclosing Saudi Arabia’s holdings, the Treasury grouped them with 14 other nations, such as Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Nigeria, under the generic heading “oil exporters”—a practice that continued for 41 years.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia continued buying: by 1977, Saudi Arabia had accumulated about 20 percent of all Treasuries held abroad, according to The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets by Columbia University’s David Spiro.
The deal led to assorted headaches: "an internal memo, dated October 1976, detailed how the U.S. inadvertently raised far more than the $800 million it intended to borrow at auction. At the time, two unidentified central banks used add-ons to buy an additional $400 million of Treasuries each. In the end, one bank was awarded its portion a day late to keep the U.S. from exceeding the limit.
Most of these maneuvers and hiccups were swept under the rug, and top Treasury officials went to great lengths to preserve the status quo and protect their Middle East allies as scrutiny of America’s biggest creditors increased
Over the years, the Treasury repeatedly turned to the International Investment and Trade in Services Survey Act of 1976—which shields individuals in countries where Treasuries are narrowly held—as its first line of defense.
The strategy continued even after the Government Accountability Office, in a 1979 investigation, found “no statistical or legal basis” for the blackout. The GAO didn’t have power to force the Treasury to turn over the data, but it concluded the U.S. “made special commitments of financial confidentiality to Saudi Arabia” and possibly other OPEC nations.
Simon, who had by then returned to Wall Street, acknowledged in congressional testimony that “regional reporting was the only way in which Saudi Arabia would agree” to invest using the add-on system.
Ultimately, Saudi dominance in the US Treasury market meant they were untouchable. "It was clear the Treasury people weren’t going to cooperate at all,” said Stephen McSpadden, a former counsel to the congressional subcommittee that pressed for the GAO inquiries. “I’d been at the subcommittee for 17 years, and I’d never seen anything like that."
Today, Parsky says the secret arrangement with the Saudis should have been dismantled years ago and was surprised the Treasury kept it in place for so long. But even so, he has no regrets. Doing the deal “was a positive for America”, he says cited by Bloomberg.
And with that the story of how the Petrodollar was born is now public information, something which Saudi Arabia may not be too happy with. For the sake of the US, it better have its ducks in order because the release of this story simply means that the US Treasury is confident it will no longer have a strategic need for its long-time Saudi partner. The Fed, which has implicitly stepped into the Saudi role, better not disappoint.
ZeroHedge.com/ABC Media, LTD
by Tyler Durden
Tuesday, 05/31/2016 - 14:32
For decades, the story of Saudi Arabia recycling petrodollars, i.e., funding the US deficit by buying US Treasuries with proceeds of its crude oil sales (mostly to the US), while the US sweetened the deal by providing the Saudis with military equipment and supplies, remained entirely in the conspiracy realm, with no confirmation or official statement from the US Treasury department.
Now, that particular "theory" becomes the latest fact, thanks to a fascinating story by Bloomberg which gives the background and details of secret meeting between then-US Treasury secretary William Simon and his deputy, Gerry Parsky, and members of the Saudi ruling elite, and lays out the history of how the petrodollar was born.
Here is the background:
It was July 1974. A steady predawn drizzle had given way to overcast skies when William Simon, newly appointed U.S. Treasury secretary, and his deputy, Gerry Parsky, stepped onto an 8 a.m. flight from Andrews Air Force Base. On board, the mood was tense. That year, the oil crisis had hit home. An embargo by OPEC’s Arab nations—payback for U.S. military aid to the Israelis during the Yom Kippur War—quadrupled oil prices. Inflation soared, the stock market crashed, and the U.S. economy was in a tailspin.
Officially, Simon’s two-week trip was billed as a tour of economic diplomacy across Europe and the Middle East, full of the customary meet-and-greets and evening banquets. But the real mission, kept in strict confidence within President Richard Nixon’s inner circle, would take place during a four-day layover in the coastal city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
The goal: neutralize crude oil as an economic weapon and find a way to persuade a hostile kingdom to finance America’s widening deficit with its newfound petrodollar wealth. And according to Parsky, President Nixon made clear there was simply no coming back empty-handed. Failure would not only jeopardize America’s financial health but could also give the Soviet Union an opening to make further inroads into the Arab world.
It “wasn’t a question of whether it could be done or it couldn’t be done,” said Parsky, 73, one of the few officials with Simon during the Saudi talks
As noted above, the framework of the required deal was simple: the U.S. would buy oil from Saudi Arabia and provide the kingdom military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance America’s spending.
The man leading the US negotiation, US Treasury Secretary William Simon, had just done a stint as Nixon’s energy czar, and "seemed ill-suited for such delicate diplomacy. Before being tapped by Nixon, the chain-smoking New Jersey native ran the vaunted Treasuries desk at Salomon Brothers. To career bureaucrats, the brash Wall Street bond trader—who once compared himself to Genghis Khan—had a temper and an outsize ego that was painfully out of step in Washington. Just a week before setting foot in Saudi Arabia, Simon publicly lambasted the Shah of Iran, a close regional ally at the time, calling him a “nut.”
But Simon, better than anyone else, understood the appeal of U.S. government debt and how to sell the Saudis on the idea that America was the safest place to park their petrodollars. With that knowledge, the administration hatched an unprecedented do-or-die plan that would come to influence just about every aspect of U.S.-Saudi relations over the next four decades (Simon died in 2000 at the age of 72).
In the beginning it wasn't easy: "it took several discreet follow-up meetings to iron out all the details, Parsky said."
But at the end of months of negotiations, Bloomberg writes, there remained one small, yet crucial, catch: King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud demanded the country’s Treasury purchases stay “strictly secret,” according to a diplomatic cable obtained by Bloomberg from the National Archives database."
The secret remains... until May 16, 2016, when the US Treasury for the first time ever revealed the full extent of Saudi TSY holdings.
Bloomberg adds that with a handful of Treasury and Federal Reserve officials, the secret was kept for more than four decades—until now. "In response to a Freedom-of-Information-Act request submitted by Bloomberg News, the Treasury broke out Saudi Arabia’s holdings for the first time this month after “concluding that it was consistent with transparency and the law to disclose the data,” according to spokeswoman Whitney Smith. The $117 billion trove makes the kingdom one of America’s largest foreign creditors."
The TIC data released later that day confirmed the FOIA response.
To be sure, as we commented in mid-May, it is very likely that the Treasury report is incomplete, and that the Saudis also own hundreds of billions in Treasurys held in custody with offshore trading centers such as Euroclear. After all, the current tally represents just 20 percent of its $587 billion of foreign reserves, well below the two-thirds that central banks typically keep in dollar assets.
What’s more, the commitment to the decades-old policy of “interdependence” between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, which arose from Simon’s debt deal and ultimately bound together two nations that share few common values, is showing signs of fraying. America has taken tentative steps toward a rapprochement with Iran, highlighted by President Barack Obama’s landmark nuclear deal last year. The U.S. shale boom has also made America far less reliant on Saudi oil.
Needless to say, the real total notional amount of Saudi holdings will eventually become known, especially if the middle-eastern nation follows through with its threat of liquidating some or all of them. What is more notable, however, is that with the first disclosure of this data since the birth of the petrodollar, something appears to have changed:
What’s more, the commitment to the decades-old policy of “interdependence” between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, which arose from Simon’s debt deal and ultimately bound together two nations that share few common values, is showing signs of fraying. America has taken tentative steps toward a rapprochement with Iran, highlighted by President Barack Obama’s landmark nuclear deal last year. The U.S. shale boom has also made America far less reliant on Saudi oil.
“Buying bonds and all that was a strategy to recycle petrodollars back into the U.S.,” said David Ottaway, a Middle East fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. But politically, “it’s always been an ambiguous, constrained relationship.”
One thing that certainly changed is that in a world where central banks are ravenously buying up each others' (and their own) debt, the need for Petrodollar recyclers such as Saudi Arabia is no longer there. But that was not always the case:
Back in 1974, forging that relationship (and the secrecy that it required) was a no-brainer, according to Parsky, who is now chairman of Aurora Capital Group, a private equity firm in Los Angeles. Many of America’s allies, including the U.K. and Japan, were also deeply dependent on Saudi oil and quietly vying to get the kingdom to reinvest money back into their own economies.
"Everyone—in the U.S., France, Britain, Japan—was trying to get their fingers in the Saudis’ pockets,” said Gordon S. Brown, an economic officer with the State Department at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh from 1976 to 1978. For the Saudis, politics played a big role in their insistence that all Treasury investments remain anonymous.
America's reliance on Saudi Arabia to fund its deficit - and obtain a cheap price for oil - meant that the kingdom would be granted Platinum status in every form of interaction with the US.
Tensions still flared 10 months after the Yom Kippur War, and throughout the Arab world, there was plenty of animosity toward the U.S. for its support of Israel. According to diplomatic cables, King Faisal’s biggest fear was the perception Saudi oil money would, “directly or indirectly,” end up in the hands of its biggest enemy in the form of additional U.S. assistance.
Treasury officials solved the dilemma by letting the Saudis in through the back door. In the first of many special arrangements, the U.S. allowed Saudi Arabia to bypass the normal competitive bidding process for buying Treasuries by creating “add-ons.” Those sales, which were excluded from the official auction totals, hid all traces of Saudi Arabia’s presence in the U.S. government debt market.
“When I arrived at the embassy, I was told by people there that this is Treasury’s business,” Brown said. “It was all handled very privately.”
Another exception was carved out for Saudi Arabia when the Treasury started releasing monthly country-by-country breakdowns of U.S. debt ownership. Instead of disclosing Saudi Arabia’s holdings, the Treasury grouped them with 14 other nations, such as Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Nigeria, under the generic heading “oil exporters”—a practice that continued for 41 years.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia continued buying: by 1977, Saudi Arabia had accumulated about 20 percent of all Treasuries held abroad, according to The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets by Columbia University’s David Spiro.
The deal led to assorted headaches: "an internal memo, dated October 1976, detailed how the U.S. inadvertently raised far more than the $800 million it intended to borrow at auction. At the time, two unidentified central banks used add-ons to buy an additional $400 million of Treasuries each. In the end, one bank was awarded its portion a day late to keep the U.S. from exceeding the limit.
Most of these maneuvers and hiccups were swept under the rug, and top Treasury officials went to great lengths to preserve the status quo and protect their Middle East allies as scrutiny of America’s biggest creditors increased
Over the years, the Treasury repeatedly turned to the International Investment and Trade in Services Survey Act of 1976—which shields individuals in countries where Treasuries are narrowly held—as its first line of defense.
The strategy continued even after the Government Accountability Office, in a 1979 investigation, found “no statistical or legal basis” for the blackout. The GAO didn’t have power to force the Treasury to turn over the data, but it concluded the U.S. “made special commitments of financial confidentiality to Saudi Arabia” and possibly other OPEC nations.
Simon, who had by then returned to Wall Street, acknowledged in congressional testimony that “regional reporting was the only way in which Saudi Arabia would agree” to invest using the add-on system.
Ultimately, Saudi dominance in the US Treasury market meant they were untouchable. "It was clear the Treasury people weren’t going to cooperate at all,” said Stephen McSpadden, a former counsel to the congressional subcommittee that pressed for the GAO inquiries. “I’d been at the subcommittee for 17 years, and I’d never seen anything like that."
Today, Parsky says the secret arrangement with the Saudis should have been dismantled years ago and was surprised the Treasury kept it in place for so long. But even so, he has no regrets. Doing the deal “was a positive for America”, he says cited by Bloomberg.
And with that the story of how the Petrodollar was born is now public information, something which Saudi Arabia may not be too happy with. For the sake of the US, it better have its ducks in order because the release of this story simply means that the US Treasury is confident it will no longer have a strategic need for its long-time Saudi partner. The Fed, which has implicitly stepped into the Saudi role, better not disappoint.
ZeroHedge.com/ABC Media, LTD
Sep 20, 2019 03:20:15 #
Addendum: Why is oil priced/traded in U.S. dollars?
Oil is priced in dollars because through Bretton Woods the dollar was pegged to gold and everything else was essentially pegged or floated to the dollar.
The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the United States, Canada, Western European countries, Australia, and Japan after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent states.
The chief features of the Bretton Woods system were an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained its external exchange rates within 1 percent by tying its currency to gold and the ability of the IMF to bridge temporary imbalances of payments. Also, there was a need to address the lack of cooperation among other countries and to prevent competitive devaluation of the currencies as well.
The world was flooded with dollars after WWII which partially led to the present American consumerism, but it also enabled the world to essentially use the dollar as they would gold. Reserves soon played a role and in order to maintain stability the gold window was closed and eventually the US went off the gold standard all together.
The global energy market is now undergoing a rapid transformation in favour of unconventionally-sourced oil and renewables. With this transformation comes a change in relations between the globe’s largest oil consumer and the globe’s largest oil exporter, the United States (U.S.) and Saudi Arabia, respectively.
Central to discussions concerning the future of the U.S.’s position in the global energy market is the fate of the petrodollar agreement constructed by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia in 1973. The agreement made Saudi petrodollars a significant stream of finance for the U.S. economy, and its upkeep is an important political-economic tool in neutralizing Saudi Arabia’s use of oil as an economic weapon while alleviating concerns over U.S. energy security. In the meantime though, oil, which is a global commodity, was traded using the U.S. dollar which drastically simplified the whole system.
If it is the case that Saudi’s treasury holdings is closer to $750 billion as they claim, than the White House’s claim of only $116 billion, then it stands to reason that Saudi oil profits are an important stream of finance for the U.S. economy, because of this petrodollar agreement.
Considering the renewable energy and unconventional oil explosion in recent years, one is left to wonder how much longer the petrodollar regime will last and what impact its end will have on the U.S. economy.
https://www.mironline.ca/petrodollar-regime-crumbling-will-u-s-economy-react/
Oil is priced in dollars because through Bretton Woods the dollar was pegged to gold and everything else was essentially pegged or floated to the dollar.
The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the United States, Canada, Western European countries, Australia, and Japan after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent states.
The chief features of the Bretton Woods system were an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained its external exchange rates within 1 percent by tying its currency to gold and the ability of the IMF to bridge temporary imbalances of payments. Also, there was a need to address the lack of cooperation among other countries and to prevent competitive devaluation of the currencies as well.
The world was flooded with dollars after WWII which partially led to the present American consumerism, but it also enabled the world to essentially use the dollar as they would gold. Reserves soon played a role and in order to maintain stability the gold window was closed and eventually the US went off the gold standard all together.
The global energy market is now undergoing a rapid transformation in favour of unconventionally-sourced oil and renewables. With this transformation comes a change in relations between the globe’s largest oil consumer and the globe’s largest oil exporter, the United States (U.S.) and Saudi Arabia, respectively.
Central to discussions concerning the future of the U.S.’s position in the global energy market is the fate of the petrodollar agreement constructed by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia in 1973. The agreement made Saudi petrodollars a significant stream of finance for the U.S. economy, and its upkeep is an important political-economic tool in neutralizing Saudi Arabia’s use of oil as an economic weapon while alleviating concerns over U.S. energy security. In the meantime though, oil, which is a global commodity, was traded using the U.S. dollar which drastically simplified the whole system.
If it is the case that Saudi’s treasury holdings is closer to $750 billion as they claim, than the White House’s claim of only $116 billion, then it stands to reason that Saudi oil profits are an important stream of finance for the U.S. economy, because of this petrodollar agreement.
Considering the renewable energy and unconventional oil explosion in recent years, one is left to wonder how much longer the petrodollar regime will last and what impact its end will have on the U.S. economy.
https://www.mironline.ca/petrodollar-regime-crumbling-will-u-s-economy-react/
Zemirah wrote:
The 40 Year Old Petrodollar Agreement Born In Secr... (show quote)
Sep 20, 2019 03:44:18 #
Zemirah wrote:
The 40 Year Old Petrodollar Agreement Born In Secr... (show quote)
Zemirah ,
It's good to know the history of this "PetroDollar" after referencing it the last decade involving our world dollar. It was under Obama's early part of his first term that the Saudis began accepting other countries exchange standards along with gold. Nations around the world would exchange hundreds of billions of their dollars for American dollars to purchase oil and not only was it the Saudis but other middle eastern countries selling oil for petrodollars. Trillions were going through the reserve in the form of T-Bills. The same time this was happening China ramped up its version of the Federal reserve and many nations began using China's T-bill and abandoning America's T-bill since China was paying a higher return with plans to replace the U.S. dollar as the worlds currency. This is in part what pushed America futher down the rabbit hole and why the great recession of 08/09 was by the purest definition our Greatest Depression and why we never even to this day exited it. Losing the power to enforce the Petrodollar under Obama accelerated our unfunded liabilities to exceeding 190 Trillion dollars.
Nixon was "nearly" by death threat pushed into our Fiat currency by the then Democrat Congress. Beyond this greatest of bad moves, Nixon was a great President for the people with far more depth than history credits.
The deep state leftist were alive and well back then as we remember "watergate" .
By the way it's great to have you back and missed your wisdom. Pray your mended and well.
God Bless
Jack
Sep 20, 2019 04:36:44 #
Floyd Brown
Loc: Milwaukee WI
Zemirah wrote:
The 40 Year Old Petrodollar Agreement Born In Secr... (show quote)
For the most part this was not a secret.
We needed the oil.
What is not clear is what did we say & how did we convince them to buy our military equipment to cover our cost of the oil.
That military equipment has added to the unrest we now see in the Middle East.
Sep 20, 2019 04:45:44 #
Zemirah wrote:
The 40 Year Old Petrodollar Agreement Born In Secr... (show quote)
Interesting read... Thanks
Sep 20, 2019 04:52:04 #
Floyd Brown
Loc: Milwaukee WI
jack sequim wa wrote:
Zemirah , br br It's good to know the history of... (show quote)
How history meets the sound bites of what is needed to switch the blame to the left for an act by a revered republican president.
Oh yes! Those on the right are so pure of heart.
Sep 20, 2019 08:22:39 #
Hi Jack,
I'm progressing well, praise be to God, thanks for your kind concern.
I posted this admittedly abbreviated historical snippet in response to a few posts on another OPP thread I noticed yesterday, showing no knowledge of our special petrodollar arrangement of long standing with Saudi Arabia, or what it entailed.
Richard Nixon was indeed a far better president than out tainted media has allowed the public to know. In comparison with the horrific out and out crimes against the U.S of "lawless" Obama, "watergate" was a misdemeanor of very little consequence.
President Nixon was so head and shoulders above Barack Obama, he was a prize whose memory we should honor.
Thanks Again For Your Added Info.
I'm progressing well, praise be to God, thanks for your kind concern.
I posted this admittedly abbreviated historical snippet in response to a few posts on another OPP thread I noticed yesterday, showing no knowledge of our special petrodollar arrangement of long standing with Saudi Arabia, or what it entailed.
Richard Nixon was indeed a far better president than out tainted media has allowed the public to know. In comparison with the horrific out and out crimes against the U.S of "lawless" Obama, "watergate" was a misdemeanor of very little consequence.
President Nixon was so head and shoulders above Barack Obama, he was a prize whose memory we should honor.
Thanks Again For Your Added Info.
jack sequim wa wrote:
Zemirah , br br It's good to know the history of... (show quote)
Sep 20, 2019 08:31:26 #
Where ever History is truly recorded, regarding politics conducted at its most sleazy level, there is no switching required in correctly finding the Leftists/Democrats/Progressives guilty on all counts.
As to the purity of anyone's heart, which is a truly lowlife and snide remark, only God can ascertain.
As to the purity of anyone's heart, which is a truly lowlife and snide remark, only God can ascertain.
Floyd Brown wrote:
How history meets the sound bites of what is needed to switch the blame to the left for an act by a revered republican president.
Oh yes! Those on the right are so pure of heart.
Oh yes! Those on the right are so pure of heart.
Sep 20, 2019 08:38:06 #
Thanks Canuckus, not usually my forte, as I prefer discussing the historically spiritual and eternal, but when the level of knowledge on earthly matters is pressing bottom so hard that I feel compelled to respond... it's reached bottom.
Canuckus Deploracus wrote:
Interesting read... Thanks
Sep 20, 2019 08:59:17 #
God explained very concisely the cause of the ongoing "unrest" in the Middle East in Genesis 16:11-12 to Hagar by describing to her the characteristics of her yet unborn son, Ishmail and all his future Arab, and now Muslim, descendants.
Genesis 16:11-12:
…11 "The Angel of the LORD proceeded: “Behold, you have conceived and will bear a son. And you shall name him Ishmael, for the LORD has heard your cry of affliction.
12 He will be a wild donkey of a man, and his hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him; he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.”
(12) He will be a wild man.--Hebrew, he will be a wild-ass man. The wild ass of the Arabian deserts is a very noble creature, and is one of the animals selected in the Book of Job as especially exemplifying the greatness of God. Its characteristics are great speed, love of solitude, and an untamable fondness of liberty.
However he will be a wild man - A wild ass of a man, so the word is: rude, and bold and fearing no man; untamed, untractable, living at large, and impatient of service and restraint. His hand will be against every man - That is his sin, and every man's hand against him - That is his punishment.
God's prophecy is as true today as it was when spoken four thousand years ago.
Genesis 16:11-12:
…11 "The Angel of the LORD proceeded: “Behold, you have conceived and will bear a son. And you shall name him Ishmael, for the LORD has heard your cry of affliction.
12 He will be a wild donkey of a man, and his hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him; he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.”
(12) He will be a wild man.--Hebrew, he will be a wild-ass man. The wild ass of the Arabian deserts is a very noble creature, and is one of the animals selected in the Book of Job as especially exemplifying the greatness of God. Its characteristics are great speed, love of solitude, and an untamable fondness of liberty.
However he will be a wild man - A wild ass of a man, so the word is: rude, and bold and fearing no man; untamed, untractable, living at large, and impatient of service and restraint. His hand will be against every man - That is his sin, and every man's hand against him - That is his punishment.
God's prophecy is as true today as it was when spoken four thousand years ago.
Floyd Brown wrote:
For the most part this was not a secret.
We needed the oil.
What is not clear is what did we say & how did we convince them to buy our military equipment to cover our cost of the oil.
That military equipment has added to the unrest we now see in the Middle East.
We needed the oil.
What is not clear is what did we say & how did we convince them to buy our military equipment to cover our cost of the oil.
That military equipment has added to the unrest we now see in the Middle East.
Sep 20, 2019 09:58:56 #
jimpack123
Loc: wisconsin
Zemirah wrote:
God explained very concisely the cause of the ongo... (show quote)
A wild ass of a man sound like Donald Trump lol
Sep 20, 2019 10:07:41 #
Zemirah wrote:
Thanks Canuckus, not usually my forte, as I prefer discussing the historically spiritual and eternal, but when the level of knowledge on earthly matters is pressing bottom so hard that I feel compelled to respond... it's reached bottom.
I appreciate all of your posts... And am glad that you are recovering... Apologies...I was unaware that there was an issue... My prayers for your continued good health...
Sep 20, 2019 12:01:39 #
Zemirah wrote:
God explained very concisely the cause of the ongo... (show quote)
Amen and Amen thanks for that Zemirah.
Sep 20, 2019 12:03:13 #
Zemirah wrote:
The 40 Year Old Petrodollar Agreement Born In Secr... (show quote)
You threw me a curve ball there Zemirah this is totally unlike your past postings but still interesting.
Sep 20, 2019 14:43:02 #
Floyd Brown wrote:
How history meets the sound bites of what is needed to switch the blame to the left for an act by a revered republican president.
Oh yes! Those on the right are so pure of heart.
Oh yes! Those on the right are so pure of heart.
One need only read history and reaching beyond revised history in no task.
Your point is meaningless based in ignorance.
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