Isn’t that the foundation of all dance? Either courtship or storytelling?
Is normal interaction allowed anymore
Keying off the last thread the viral storm isnt just on the internet but your local tv and paper and everything that relies on a source including key institutions
Beautiful mostly, but some weird moves in spots. I think it is the influence of the over-fondness that “So You Think You Can Dance” has for krumping. I’d like it a lot better if they took that crap out.
“Iran, Saudi Arabia agree to resume ties, with China’s help”
“Petrodollars are crude oil export revenues denominated in U.S. dollars. The term gained currency in the mid-1970s when soaring oil prices generated large trade and current account surpluses for oil exporting countries.”
“Then as now, oil sales and the resulting current account surpluses were denominated in dollars because the U.S. dollar was—and remains—by far the most widely used currency.”
That’s an horrific offense against POC in LA. Worse yet, those same ‘white’ drivers are breathing the oxygen – a double whammy. It’s appalling.
At the very least, the offenders should be driven out. Out, out, out!
@MBunge
I wonder how many people in the media or U.S. government have the slightest idea of what Petrodollars becoming Petroyuans would mean.
The obsession with the “Petrodollar” as something beyond a moderately important fossil fuel market term has always been an overhyped, conspiratorial piece of economically and historically illiterate bullshit. Archetypical magical thinking trying to explain the resilience of the US by pointing to an admittedly very important set of commodities and a couple important diplomatic connections to argue it’s the basis of American power.
The problem is that this requires not studying enough history or economics to realize that not only is this not true, in many cases it is diametrically the opposite of reality. The “Petrodollar” became one of the base units of trade in the fuel economy because of the US’s power and prominence, it did not create US power.
Here are some useful sources that go into the many, many problems with the Petrodollar fetish and the idea that pricing oil in something else would lead to the collapse of the Western world order.
To all of these I’ll add in my two cents. Had the PRC been the dominant global power or at least one of the major economies at the time, it probably could and would have forced the likes of Saudi Arabia to accept pricing products in Yuan, at least to some degree (though for various reasons I’ll get into, it probably would not have been nearly as successful).
The fact is that for all of the many, many, many, manymanymany problems with the US Dollar and the Fed, the British Exchequer, and the French, their currencies have been among the great success stories in world history at retaining their value even as time passed and their reach spread. Which is why long before Bretton-Woods, the US dominance after WWII, and the supposed codification of the “Petrodollar” the USD had vast pull on the world market as a whole, and particularly so on the global oil markets, with the Pound Sterling previously being dominant but now in a respectable second or third place alongside the newcomer Euro, and with the French Franc as sort of a perennial runner up.
This is because governments and political factions throughout history usually debase their currency in order to do things like provide political gibs or enrich themselves, and we’re seeing that here. But the US economy was and to a lesser extent still is so vibrant that it takes A LOT to substantially debase its value, especially on the day-to-day marketplace (that might change and if it does we all should be afraid, but I’ll get into that more). This is particularly valuable because as the coin of purchase in pretty powerful, advanced, modern empires people wanted this currency, and as currencies that were not egregiously mismanaged, abused, or puppeteered they held value far better than – say- the Ruble.
So if you were some second rate Asian kingdom or bankrupt Hispanic American banana republic in the 19th century, you’d often do some of your finances (especially exports) by computing for British Pounds Sterling. And if you are a nation in the 20th or 21st century, you generally do some conversion and trade in USD (if you don’t go full bore and outright dollarize entirely, which some countries do). The reason is very simple. There aren’t going to be many shop clerks in Kensington or even small scale artisanal crafts based out of the US Bay Area or Lebanon that know what to do with the Peruvian Sol. They do however know what to do with the USD.
So it makes sense to go to a specialist vendor who knows what to do with Peruvian Sol and use Sol to buy USD, and then use USD to buy whatever you want or need. It’s a bit like using English or French or Mandarin when traveling abroad rather than going around – say – Bologna, Italy speaking Mongolian and looking for service.
The fact that the US was a major oil exporter for most of its modern history also helped, because this meant the US always had an outsized power in the oil market. And it was this outsized power that led the likes of the Saudis to like denominating their oil prices in dollars to begin with (decades before the agreement that made this practice official and mandatory), and allowed the US to pull the probably-more-important-but-still-overrated actual flexes of forcing a lot of the world’s economies to tap their currency to the US Dollar at Bretton-Woods.
This is something most Petrodollar fetishists don’t understand and never have. The “Petrodollar” is sustained more than anything as a matter of preference by the participants in the global market. It is just a Eurodollar* (* and no, not all Eurodollars are in Europe any more) being used temporarily in a certain field of trade. The idea that if you could persuade the Saudis to just sell oil in Yuan the world would be turned upside down or if Gaddafi had enough gold to make his “Golden Dinar for Africa” the US and France would feel so threatened is missing the point.
This is especially since at the time the USD moved from being merely “one of” the world’s great reserve currencies to being THE preferred reserve currency in the 1940s-1950s, not only had US Dollar influence on the markets been running strong for decades to the point where even the domestic nightmare of the Great Depression and its mismanagement didn’t destroy its market share, but many of its competitors were either going through even more acute stresses and most of the truly big names – the Ruble, the Mark, et cetera- were subject to inordinate manipulation and arcane control schemes that made it REALLY REALLY REALLY UNATTRACTIVE to denominate your business in say Rubles.
The Lira always was an absolute hot mess that continued on almost in spite of itself due to Italian savvy, but it was absolute folly to use it under say Mussolini’s tenure.
That’s the problem the Yuan has, but cranked up to 11. The CCP is not merely totalitarian and shameless about manipulating the Yuan in monumentally artificial ways, but it is also incredibly secretive and dishonest in how it does it. Which is why the Saudis can’t guarantee they’d be getting a good trade if they did sell it and so mostly decided “No thanks, we don’t need this trouble. Gib Dollars.”
Because even authoritarian, totalitarian, corrupt, and manipulative regimes that happily screw with their own currencies don’t *want to do business* in currencies controlled by someone like themselves, and neither do most people on the market place.
Which brings me to the conclusion and answer to the question of “what would Petrodollars becoming Petroyuans mean?”
The answer is “Not much, if anything.”
However, that’s for two major reasons, because there are two major scenarios I can see where “Petrodollars become Petroyuans.”
Firstly: The CCP is able to convince, cajole, bribe, or manipulate the Saudis, OPEC, and others to denominate oil sales in Yuan along with Dollars. This is essentially what the result would have been had the Saudis accepted Xi’s charm offensive to do this weeks ago.
And the reason this wouldn’t change much if anything is simple. It’s just selling products (albeit very important products) in another currency. It’d be a bit like McDonalds in America making the decision to have its American stores accept payments in Yuan or the Rupee.
The problem from the CCP is that merely getting the Saudis to slap a “Price in Yuan” sign on the window doesn’t solve many of their key problems.
A. The Yuan is still a nontransparent currency manipulated openly and heavy-handedly by a totalitarian dictatorship in ways that undercut trust and value in it, and so most brokers don’t want to be dependent on it. Nobody can be ABSOLUTELY sure the CCP will not try another heavy handed currency manipulation like say massive printing tomorrow, and if they cannot be sure of that they will be leery about accepting it.
B. The accumulated informed choices for doing business in USD and to a lesser extent Euros and Pounds would still be there and require A LOT OF SUCCESS to seriously erode, which will be harder to achieve because of Point A. People are just more familiar and comfortable doing business in the USD.
That makes it much harder for “Petroyuans” to win away market share from “Petrodollars.”
C: The Petroyuan is seen (correctly) as a much more nakedly partisan and political initiative than the Petrodollar ever has been (even at the peak of its politicization). There’s a reason why OPEC primarily preferred trading and pricing in USD even during the great Oil Embargos.
The quest for the Petroyuan is basically a glorified prestige project by the CCP under the rough logic that ‘Hey, CHINA GREAT POWER! GREAT POWER SHOULD BE ABLE TO BUY OIL USING GREAT POWER CURRENCY! PEOPLE SHOULD WANT TO USE CHINA TRADE LIKE THEY DID IN THE 18TH CENTURY BEFORE BARBARIANS RUINED EVERYTHING!”
While conveniently ignoring not just the reasons WHY the wider world dumped all its silver into China at the time, but also why it STOPPED doing so. It reminds me of a very Confucian-Literati/Bureaucrat, economically illiterate view on trade. That the Central State and its Ruler should naturally attract people to give tribute to it and imitate it. Except while Confucius was an economic dumb dumb, he at least had coherent ideological explanations for why “Barbarians” should be attracted to follow a virtuous monarch ruling over All of Heaven. The CCP’s leadership largely split the difference and have half-baked explanations for why the world should do both, that aren’t very convincing.
Which is again why they failed to land.
So in this scenario, the “Petroyuan” would basically become a niche market in the global hydrocarbons markets used by the PRC and those governments that find it either necessary or convenient to suck off the PRC, but which is operating mostly off of vanity than any coherent economic rationale and so is essentially a footnote in the greater global trade (to say nothing of politics), with even those businesses that regularly DO use the Petroyuan largely “thinking” in USD.
But there is another outcome, one that resembles the nightmare scenarios of Petrodollar Fetishists, though not for the reasons they think of.
Second scenario being one where for whatever reasons, the economic and political situation has so changed that the CCP is essentially able to either coax or dictate the Yuan as either a major or the only form of denominating oil prices to OPEC etc. al.
And this is scary not because of what impact this would have on politics (though I doubt it would have been good), but because of what impacts would have ALREADY HAPPENED to have brought this about. Because this means that the CCP has gotten its act together enough to beat the US at the game and make the Yuan about as powerful and appealing as the USD, or at least that the CCP has screwed up less so the US fell apart faster than they did.
And that’s the real scary thing. Because the “Petroyuan” in this scenario would be far more prominent, but it would also honestly change less. The important change would be what already happened to bring it about.
Fortunately I view this situation as very very unlikely, at least in regards to the Yuan. The CCP is just so corrupt, totalitarian, and self-defeating and based on demographics that are even worse than ours it will probably break down well before the US and USD do. And in any case economic theory has always been one of China’s great weaknesses through its history, and this hasn’t changed much with the CCP’s ascendency. I wonder how many Chinese leaders actually sat down to ask themselves how they could plan to create a currency that mid sized American or European oil traders doing business primarily in Europe or Africa would find it appealing to trade for Yuan to then buy oil with.
Because that’s the kind of global appeal that helped land the Pound and then the Dollar as kings of the oil market, and it’s that kind of appeal that the Yuan would need to dethrone the Dollar.
I’m guessing the CCP’s bigwigs haven’t spent NEARLY as much time or effort thinking and planning for that as by logic they should have.
And I know it’s pointless to state this but if you think the Iraq War mess doesn’t play as big a part in this as the Afghanistan debacle, think again.
I’ve thought about it plenty. You should stop assuming that nobody else thinks or considers things.
You’re on thin ice already.
Late to the party but this came up on my sidebar watching Neo’s flirting clip, and I think it might interest the Dance Historians among us.
Nine minutes of demonstration, with entertaining and informative commentary: barre exercises in 1820, 1880, and “today” (2016).
Very cute!
Isn’t that the foundation of all dance? Either courtship or storytelling?
Is normal interaction allowed anymore
Keying off the last thread the viral storm isnt just on the internet but your local tv and paper and everything that relies on a source including key institutions
Beautiful mostly, but some weird moves in spots. I think it is the influence of the over-fondness that “So You Think You Can Dance” has for krumping. I’d like it a lot better if they took that crap out.
“Iran, Saudi Arabia agree to resume ties, with China’s help”
https://apnews.com/article/saudi-arabia-iran-diplomatic-ties-2f80bb71a995910cb4b172e5dbee3526
“What Are Petrodollars?”
“Petrodollars are crude oil export revenues denominated in U.S. dollars. The term gained currency in the mid-1970s when soaring oil prices generated large trade and current account surpluses for oil exporting countries.”
“Then as now, oil sales and the resulting current account surpluses were denominated in dollars because the U.S. dollar was—and remains—by far the most widely used currency.”
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/petrodollars.asp
I wonder how many people in the media or U.S. government have the slightest idea of what Petrodollars becoming Petroyuans would mean.
And I know it’s pointless to state this but if you think the Iraq War mess doesn’t play as big a part in this as the Afghanistan debacle, think again.
Mike
I wonder how many people in the media or U.S. government have the slightest idea of what Petrodollars becoming Petroyuans would mean.
Not a whole lot.
And I know it’s pointless to state this but if you think the Iraq War mess doesn’t play as big a part in this as the Afghanistan debacle, think again.
I’m thinking. It doesn’t.
LA Times writer says ‘White’ drivers are ‘polluting the air’ breathed by LA’s ‘people of color’
That’s an horrific offense against POC in LA. Worse yet, those same ‘white’ drivers are breathing the oxygen – a double whammy. It’s appalling.
At the very least, the offenders should be driven out. Out, out, out!
@MBunge
The obsession with the “Petrodollar” as something beyond a moderately important fossil fuel market term has always been an overhyped, conspiratorial piece of economically and historically illiterate bullshit. Archetypical magical thinking trying to explain the resilience of the US by pointing to an admittedly very important set of commodities and a couple important diplomatic connections to argue it’s the basis of American power.
The problem is that this requires not studying enough history or economics to realize that not only is this not true, in many cases it is diametrically the opposite of reality. The “Petrodollar” became one of the base units of trade in the fuel economy because of the US’s power and prominence, it did not create US power.
Here are some useful sources that go into the many, many problems with the Petrodollar fetish and the idea that pricing oil in something else would lead to the collapse of the Western world order.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/11/debunking-the-petrodollar-myth-pricing-oil-in-dollars-is-just-a-convention.html
https://jameslate.medium.com/debunking-the-petrodollar-myth-1a4bc596472e
https://leofinance.io/@taskmaster4450le/the-petrodollar-myth
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-myth-of-the-inevitablerise-of-apetroyuan/2023/02/27/7d6cd58c-b65e-11ed-b0df-8ca14de679ad_story.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglasbulloch/2018/04/26/the-petro-dollar-is-a-myth-the-petro-yuan-mere-fantasy/?sh=294644296a14
And for one of my favorite but more casual ones…
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/59xceb/into_the_black_hole_of_petrodollar_bullshit/
To all of these I’ll add in my two cents. Had the PRC been the dominant global power or at least one of the major economies at the time, it probably could and would have forced the likes of Saudi Arabia to accept pricing products in Yuan, at least to some degree (though for various reasons I’ll get into, it probably would not have been nearly as successful).
The fact is that for all of the many, many, many, manymanymany problems with the US Dollar and the Fed, the British Exchequer, and the French, their currencies have been among the great success stories in world history at retaining their value even as time passed and their reach spread. Which is why long before Bretton-Woods, the US dominance after WWII, and the supposed codification of the “Petrodollar” the USD had vast pull on the world market as a whole, and particularly so on the global oil markets, with the Pound Sterling previously being dominant but now in a respectable second or third place alongside the newcomer Euro, and with the French Franc as sort of a perennial runner up.
This is because governments and political factions throughout history usually debase their currency in order to do things like provide political gibs or enrich themselves, and we’re seeing that here. But the US economy was and to a lesser extent still is so vibrant that it takes A LOT to substantially debase its value, especially on the day-to-day marketplace (that might change and if it does we all should be afraid, but I’ll get into that more). This is particularly valuable because as the coin of purchase in pretty powerful, advanced, modern empires people wanted this currency, and as currencies that were not egregiously mismanaged, abused, or puppeteered they held value far better than – say- the Ruble.
So if you were some second rate Asian kingdom or bankrupt Hispanic American banana republic in the 19th century, you’d often do some of your finances (especially exports) by computing for British Pounds Sterling. And if you are a nation in the 20th or 21st century, you generally do some conversion and trade in USD (if you don’t go full bore and outright dollarize entirely, which some countries do). The reason is very simple. There aren’t going to be many shop clerks in Kensington or even small scale artisanal crafts based out of the US Bay Area or Lebanon that know what to do with the Peruvian Sol. They do however know what to do with the USD.
So it makes sense to go to a specialist vendor who knows what to do with Peruvian Sol and use Sol to buy USD, and then use USD to buy whatever you want or need. It’s a bit like using English or French or Mandarin when traveling abroad rather than going around – say – Bologna, Italy speaking Mongolian and looking for service.
The fact that the US was a major oil exporter for most of its modern history also helped, because this meant the US always had an outsized power in the oil market. And it was this outsized power that led the likes of the Saudis to like denominating their oil prices in dollars to begin with (decades before the agreement that made this practice official and mandatory), and allowed the US to pull the probably-more-important-but-still-overrated actual flexes of forcing a lot of the world’s economies to tap their currency to the US Dollar at Bretton-Woods.
This is something most Petrodollar fetishists don’t understand and never have. The “Petrodollar” is sustained more than anything as a matter of preference by the participants in the global market. It is just a Eurodollar* (* and no, not all Eurodollars are in Europe any more) being used temporarily in a certain field of trade. The idea that if you could persuade the Saudis to just sell oil in Yuan the world would be turned upside down or if Gaddafi had enough gold to make his “Golden Dinar for Africa” the US and France would feel so threatened is missing the point.
This is especially since at the time the USD moved from being merely “one of” the world’s great reserve currencies to being THE preferred reserve currency in the 1940s-1950s, not only had US Dollar influence on the markets been running strong for decades to the point where even the domestic nightmare of the Great Depression and its mismanagement didn’t destroy its market share, but many of its competitors were either going through even more acute stresses and most of the truly big names – the Ruble, the Mark, et cetera- were subject to inordinate manipulation and arcane control schemes that made it REALLY REALLY REALLY UNATTRACTIVE to denominate your business in say Rubles.
The Lira always was an absolute hot mess that continued on almost in spite of itself due to Italian savvy, but it was absolute folly to use it under say Mussolini’s tenure.
That’s the problem the Yuan has, but cranked up to 11. The CCP is not merely totalitarian and shameless about manipulating the Yuan in monumentally artificial ways, but it is also incredibly secretive and dishonest in how it does it. Which is why the Saudis can’t guarantee they’d be getting a good trade if they did sell it and so mostly decided “No thanks, we don’t need this trouble. Gib Dollars.”
Because even authoritarian, totalitarian, corrupt, and manipulative regimes that happily screw with their own currencies don’t *want to do business* in currencies controlled by someone like themselves, and neither do most people on the market place.
Which brings me to the conclusion and answer to the question of “what would Petrodollars becoming Petroyuans mean?”
The answer is “Not much, if anything.”
However, that’s for two major reasons, because there are two major scenarios I can see where “Petrodollars become Petroyuans.”
Firstly: The CCP is able to convince, cajole, bribe, or manipulate the Saudis, OPEC, and others to denominate oil sales in Yuan along with Dollars. This is essentially what the result would have been had the Saudis accepted Xi’s charm offensive to do this weeks ago.
And the reason this wouldn’t change much if anything is simple. It’s just selling products (albeit very important products) in another currency. It’d be a bit like McDonalds in America making the decision to have its American stores accept payments in Yuan or the Rupee.
The problem from the CCP is that merely getting the Saudis to slap a “Price in Yuan” sign on the window doesn’t solve many of their key problems.
A. The Yuan is still a nontransparent currency manipulated openly and heavy-handedly by a totalitarian dictatorship in ways that undercut trust and value in it, and so most brokers don’t want to be dependent on it. Nobody can be ABSOLUTELY sure the CCP will not try another heavy handed currency manipulation like say massive printing tomorrow, and if they cannot be sure of that they will be leery about accepting it.
B. The accumulated informed choices for doing business in USD and to a lesser extent Euros and Pounds would still be there and require A LOT OF SUCCESS to seriously erode, which will be harder to achieve because of Point A. People are just more familiar and comfortable doing business in the USD.
That makes it much harder for “Petroyuans” to win away market share from “Petrodollars.”
C: The Petroyuan is seen (correctly) as a much more nakedly partisan and political initiative than the Petrodollar ever has been (even at the peak of its politicization). There’s a reason why OPEC primarily preferred trading and pricing in USD even during the great Oil Embargos.
The quest for the Petroyuan is basically a glorified prestige project by the CCP under the rough logic that ‘Hey, CHINA GREAT POWER! GREAT POWER SHOULD BE ABLE TO BUY OIL USING GREAT POWER CURRENCY! PEOPLE SHOULD WANT TO USE CHINA TRADE LIKE THEY DID IN THE 18TH CENTURY BEFORE BARBARIANS RUINED EVERYTHING!”
While conveniently ignoring not just the reasons WHY the wider world dumped all its silver into China at the time, but also why it STOPPED doing so. It reminds me of a very Confucian-Literati/Bureaucrat, economically illiterate view on trade. That the Central State and its Ruler should naturally attract people to give tribute to it and imitate it. Except while Confucius was an economic dumb dumb, he at least had coherent ideological explanations for why “Barbarians” should be attracted to follow a virtuous monarch ruling over All of Heaven. The CCP’s leadership largely split the difference and have half-baked explanations for why the world should do both, that aren’t very convincing.
Which is again why they failed to land.
So in this scenario, the “Petroyuan” would basically become a niche market in the global hydrocarbons markets used by the PRC and those governments that find it either necessary or convenient to suck off the PRC, but which is operating mostly off of vanity than any coherent economic rationale and so is essentially a footnote in the greater global trade (to say nothing of politics), with even those businesses that regularly DO use the Petroyuan largely “thinking” in USD.
But there is another outcome, one that resembles the nightmare scenarios of Petrodollar Fetishists, though not for the reasons they think of.
Second scenario being one where for whatever reasons, the economic and political situation has so changed that the CCP is essentially able to either coax or dictate the Yuan as either a major or the only form of denominating oil prices to OPEC etc. al.
And this is scary not because of what impact this would have on politics (though I doubt it would have been good), but because of what impacts would have ALREADY HAPPENED to have brought this about. Because this means that the CCP has gotten its act together enough to beat the US at the game and make the Yuan about as powerful and appealing as the USD, or at least that the CCP has screwed up less so the US fell apart faster than they did.
And that’s the real scary thing. Because the “Petroyuan” in this scenario would be far more prominent, but it would also honestly change less. The important change would be what already happened to bring it about.
Fortunately I view this situation as very very unlikely, at least in regards to the Yuan. The CCP is just so corrupt, totalitarian, and self-defeating and based on demographics that are even worse than ours it will probably break down well before the US and USD do. And in any case economic theory has always been one of China’s great weaknesses through its history, and this hasn’t changed much with the CCP’s ascendency. I wonder how many Chinese leaders actually sat down to ask themselves how they could plan to create a currency that mid sized American or European oil traders doing business primarily in Europe or Africa would find it appealing to trade for Yuan to then buy oil with.
Because that’s the kind of global appeal that helped land the Pound and then the Dollar as kings of the oil market, and it’s that kind of appeal that the Yuan would need to dethrone the Dollar.
I’m guessing the CCP’s bigwigs haven’t spent NEARLY as much time or effort thinking and planning for that as by logic they should have.
I’ve thought about it plenty. You should stop assuming that nobody else thinks or considers things.
You’re on thin ice already.
Late to the party but this came up on my sidebar watching Neo’s flirting clip, and I think it might interest the Dance Historians among us.
Nine minutes of demonstration, with entertaining and informative commentary: barre exercises in 1820, 1880, and “today” (2016).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EjfGgvsldM
Ballet Evolved: How ballet class has changed over the centuries