Re:People are worried about America's solvency
by ethbr1 on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @03:34PM
(#49366161)
Ironically, the US being an oil import / exporter is the least important country to this system, given it's the only one able to arbitrarily inflate the US dollar supply.
The forex vs oil scale is valid point, and it'd be curious to compare it across the decades.
Per some preliminary numbers, Brenton Woods being abandoned in 1971 led to market forex volume substantially growing every year.
Oil:forex looks like ~1:150 in 1980, scaling to 1:500 in 2010.
So indeed an increasingly smaller portion of the forex pie.
One piece of evidence - around 2020 the US went from being an oil importer to an oil exporter and people hardly noticed.
I also think if Saudi asked to be paid in Euros rather than USD it wouldn't make much difference. People just change currencies into what they need. They are just tokens to facilitate the trade of goods and services like oil for Ferraris in Euro or oil for Boeings in USD. The forex markets are huge.