"Petrodollars" are completely unimportant. They just mean Saudi Arabia's financial reserves, and KSA is not a large country so it wouldn't matter if they abandoned the dollar.

If anyone ever mentions petrodollars, CBDC, or crypto to you, they are crazy and I recommend stealing their wallet.

The populist right's obsession with currency -- pointing fingers at state banks and currency systems and money lenders and so on -- is a product of their unwillingness to point fingers at real corporate sources of power & control in the world. In large part because they're sympathetic to them (or outright funded by them in some cases.)

At best this kind of stuff is a harmless ideological pressure release valve for a discontented middle class / small business / entrepreneurial layer squeezed from above (esp after COVID). At worst it veers into outright authoritarian & xenophobic politics and often blends in some anti-Semitism. Starts with rants about Bretton-Woods and the next thing you know you're hearing about the Rothschilds.

There was a whole wing of this stuff ascendant in the 1930s (in western Canada we had "Social Credit", for example) whose ideological purpose was to displace left wing populism and anti-capitalist politics with an explicitly pro-capitalist highly social conservative narrative which pinned blame for problems on "international banking" and, ultimately, Jewish people.

The latest flavour is obsessed with talk about "petrodollars" and cryptocurrency, and then you scratch a little and there's the face of Sergei Lavrov or Marie Le Pen hiding under the paint.

The world is f*cked and unjust but not for the reasons that these people go on about.

Shows where my brain was at yesterday - that was a pretty ill-formed comment. I regret including the term without a fuller understanding of what I was saying, however I reject the notion of being associated with racist populism for making a criticism of the oil-based economy.

That's fair, I was more riffing on parent's comment, buzzed on early morning coffee. Not calling you a fascist.

I do agree that the bulk of the foundation of the world's economy is constructed over the petroleum economy. Though I also don't think the nature of power in the world would change significantly if that were to be replaced with something else or if the nationality of the currency it is traded in were to change.

Remember the US is an oil exporter now. Most of this oil analysis stuff is leftover from the 2000s; it's also coming from overly materialist analysis of the Iraq War, where they assumed "this war is for Iraq oil" instead of the real answer which is literally "we invaded Iraq because we felt like it".