Why not back the US dollar with the price of a barrel of oil?

You could use oil instead of gold to back the money.

Say 70 dollars US would always get you one barrel of oil.

How much in oil reserves does the US have? If oil is abiotic the the supply is way up there.

100 trillion worth of oil reserves? Maybe.

This printing money to buy assets is waay lame. Soon they will be buying state bonds and muni bonds.

Just a short rant for your casual entertainment.

reply to post by sonofonehunlo


They already do.

The world's reserve currency is the US dollar. OPEC regulates oil prices via the US dollar.

The US dollar IS backed by the price of oil.

~Tenth

10th ya beat me to it...

OPEC!!!!!

Oil supplies shift too fluidly. There are still rumors ..or perhaps more... of truly massive reserves of Oil having been located near a little spot of island in Alaska and covered up to be tucked away for a future date. Islands in the Western Pacific (China and Japan are eyeballing over one set of a few ) are in hot contention over oil....and Russia dropped their flag, literally, to symbolically stake claim for it in the Arctic circle...by submarine. Cheeky people on that one...

I'd say if oil were the true, literal measure of reserves and wealth in the sense of physical gold in vaults? World War would be weeks following to settle claims world wide on what was a passing economic interest the day before, but becomes a strategic necessity then.

reply to post by sonofonehunlo


As long as the FED keeps printing money out of thin air and charging it to the taxpayers, nothing will make a difference........This ponzi scheme that our government is covering up for makes Bernie Madhoff look like a choir boy!

This would be a bad idea, because oil will eventually be depleted, thus the value of the dollar is diminished. The dollar is backed by the Federal reserve and the "belief" in the US Government. As long as we hold the values of freedom and the undoubted unalienable rights of the human being, the US Dollar will continuously be of some value, no matter its quantity. By surjection of Absolute Truth, the dollar will always remain of value by its current attributes as currency.

reply to post by seeker1963


By the value on which the dollar is based by the continuity of the evolution of life, so does the allowance for the quantity of the US dollar to increase. It is a beautiful thing. Freedom is more than free.

Oil is the only thing backing up the Petrodollar. Once they start selling oil in other than dollars, the wheels will fall off. Both Iraq and Libya tried it and look what happened.

Originally posted by JustMike

The following is my opinion as a member participating in this discussion.

reply to post by sonofonehunlo

 

The USD hasn't been backed by gold as a benchmark for years. It's all "fiat money" now, which as another poster mentioned, basically means they can print money backed by nothing.

While the oil price is commonly linked to the dollar on most markets it's a bit of a game really, because if the value of the dollar drops and the oil price goes up to compensate, nothing really changes much in net terms.

Put it this way: no matter what is used as a money standard and no matter what it is backed by -- if anything -- the situation will still stay the same: the very rich will do fine as they always do and the rest will struggle along. As they always do.

Sorry to sound depressing but that's pretty much the long and the short of it.

As an ATS Staff Member, I will not moderate in threads such as this where I have participated as a member.

edit on 14/9/12 by JustMike because: (no reason given)

This is "fatalism" and I don't accept it. Humans are not mud turtles.

A single act of faith by our leadership could turn things around and put us in the right direction.

A single pen stroke. (not referring to the idea originally posted here.)

reply to post by sonofonehunlo


Research Petro-Dollar.
Ditto CaptChaos.