BRICS challenges US ‘dollar dominance’, Saudi considers selling oil in other currencies: New multipolar economic order

BRICS is “developing a fairer system of monetary exchange” to challenge the “dominance of the dollar”, South Africa revealed. Saudi Arabia is considering selling oil in other currencies. Economist Zoltan Pozsar says the US “unipolar era” is over.

by Ben Norton

Part 3 - Saudi Arabia considers selling oil in other currencies

While the BRICS is gradually moving toward de-dollarization, one of Washington’s most important historical allies is doing the same.

The world’s largest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia, has publicly acknowledged that it is considering selling its crude in other currencies, not just the US dollar.

Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan told Bloomberg TV, “There are no issues with discussing how we settle our trade arrangements, whether it is in the US dollar, whether it is the euro, whether it is the Saudi riyal”.

“I don’t think we are waving away or ruling out any discussion that will help improve the trade around the world”, he said.

In 1974, Saudi Arabia agreed to sell its crude in the dollar and invest its oil revenue in Treasury securities, in return for US government protection.

This petrodollar system helped undergird the status of the greenback as the global reserve currency, after US President Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar to gold in 1971.

But the petrodollar now has direct challengers.

The Wall Street Journal reported in March 2022 that “Saudi Arabia [was] in active talks with Beijing to price some of its oil sales to China in yuan”. Riyadh did not publicly confirm this at the time.

Chinese President Xi Jinping then visited Riyadh in December, where he held a historic meeting with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the 21 member states of the Arab League.

Xi said he and top officials from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman discussed purchasing Persian Gulf energy with China’s own currency, the renminbi.

The Chinese president explained, in comments reported by Reuters: “China will continue to import large quantities of crude oil from GCC countries, expand imports of liquefied natural gas, strengthen cooperation in upstream oil and gas development, engineering services, storage, transportation and refining, and make full use of the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange as a platform to carry out yuan settlement of oil and gas trade”.

China is already Saudi Arabia’s top trading partner, and Beijing, Riyadh, and the GCC pledged to deepen their multilateral trade.

Source, links:

https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/01/21/brics-us-dollar-saudi-oil-currency-multipolar/

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