Dollar

ussia, the world's second-largest oil-exporting nation after Saudi Arabia, has been quietly preparing to switch trading in Russian Ural Blend oil, the country's primary export, from the dollar to the ruble. But the change, if it comes, is still some time off, industry analysts and officials said. The Russian effort began modestly this month, with trading in refined products for the domestic market.

What if the international currency of the future isn’t the dollar, but isn’t the euro either? James D. Grant, the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer and an expert on financial markets, discusses the “historical anomaly” of currencies like the dollar and the euro as uncollateralized international reserve currencies—that is, ones that aren’t backed by a guarantee that they can be exchanged for something else, such as gold or silver.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia: A rare meeting of the heads of state of the OPEC countries ended here Sunday on a political note, with two leaders — President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran — blaming the weakness of the United States dollar for high oil prices. Despite the best efforts of the host country, Saudi Arabia, to steer the meeting away from politics and promote OPEC's environmental concerns, the leaders of Venezuela and Iran let loose some show-stealing statements. "The dollar is in free fall, everyone should be worried about it," Chávez told reporters here. "The fall of the dollar is not the fall of the dollar — it's the fall of the American empire." During a news conference after the meeting, Ahmadinejad added: "The U.S. dollar has no economic value."

Opec countries meeting in Saudi Arabia clashed on Friday over the declaration to be made by leaders at this weekend’s summit, as Venezuela and Iran pushed for a statement on the impact of the weak dollar on the group’s revenues. The disagreement was revealed when a ministerial meeting Friday afternoon, supposed to be in closed session, was accidentally broadcast live to reporters.

Governments must let go of the fatal notion that nationhood requires them to make and control the money used in their territory. National currencies and global markets simply do not mix; together they make a deadly brew of currency crises and geopolitical tension and create ready pretexts for damaging protectionism. In order to globalize safely, countries should abandon monetary nationalism and abolish unwanted currencies, the source of much of today's instability.

The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung, reports that the CIA could be responsible for manufacturing the 'Supernotes', the nearly-perfect counterfeit 50 and 100 US dollar notes, and not North Korea, as it was claimed before by the US Governement.

Sources allege that the CIA prints the falsified 'Supernotes' at a secret facility near Washington to fund covert operations without Congressional oversight.

As a component of George W. Bush's world of "globalism," the status and health of the U.S. dollar deserves close scrutiny, closer than my mention of it in a recent column. As I've written, China is now the holder of an incredible stash of dollars. Some reports have their cache valued at over $1 trillion. You don't have to be an economics professor to worry about numbers like that. That's quite a fistful of dollars for a burgeoning superpower nation whose ultimate geopolitical goals have always been suspect. China, conceivably, could put the U.S. economy in peril if it chose to dump these dollars on the open currency market.