It is a little sad to see one of the more intelligent online forums slowly degenerate into yet another site where conspiracy idiots ply their mindless trade.

>>...the new government in Kiev shot down MH17, and the US orchestrated, in an unseemly but unsurprisingly quick fashion, the world's condemnation of Russia for Kiev's black act...<<

>>... the brainwashing Western media propaganda that Russia ‘grabbed’ Crimea and shot down MH17...<<

>>...the US suddenly realised it needed to invade Iraq over its weapons of mass destruction...<<

>>...the Libyan people suddenly decided they wanted ‘democracy’ and that Gaddafi was a despot that US-Nato needed to help the Libyan people to get rid of...<<

It seems that the first casualty of the internet is using the brain. So little thought is necessary to cut'n'paste the "opinions" of hysterical paranoids, we are in danger of drowning in the utter irrelevance of it all.

Which is disappointing.

As oil prices are determined in real time, it doesn't really make much difference what currency it's sold in.

Pericles

'So little thought is necessary to cut'n'paste the "opinions" of hysterical paranoids'

Obviously, you prefer to blow rhetorical raspberries rather than make an effort to find out anything other than what you've been told, or learn about anything you don't want to know.

Aidan

'As oil prices are determined in real time, it doesn't really make much difference what currency it's sold in.'

It's the global ramifications of the petrodollar that make it important. Since 1971, the petrodollar has allowed the US to dominate the global financial system, to use the IMF and World Bank to impose its debt-based credit system on much of the rest of the world, and to use sanctions and other forms of financial warfare on 'uncooperative' states.

The US is now (justifiably) in full panic mode that it is losing its global financial hegemony. That makes it very dangerous and BRICS is the new war front.

The US dollar's domination of the world financial system has little to do with oil — it's mainly a remnant of thr Bretton Woods era. And its domination may have been important to America in the 1970s, but its significance has dwindled as the world's financial system has become more sophisticated. If the dollar hegemony ended next week, its effects would be trivial.