There are other backers to that as well. The main ones being oil trades being settled largely in USD and the need to acquire USD to pay for US goods/services. It's not all military might there's a lot of economic might in there too.
This is the important point. Oil was/is settled in dollars. The world is rapidly moving away from oil. China has already hit peak oil. China is 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity. If you're leaving oil behind, and buying solar, batteries, and EVs from China, your need for dollars declines, and need for yuan goes up. Also, stocks vs flows. You have to keep buying oil every day from petrostates, while the clean tech you buy is yours for its entire service life (a decade or more for EVs, decades for solar and stationary battery storage).
The US did well when the Saudis required dollars for oil as part of the US-Saudi security and military arrangement, and that arrangement is declining in value over time as the value of oil to the global economy declines. The US loses investors in US treasuries when folks who sold oil for dollars do not have dollars from oil sales. Shades of theta decay.
> "The petrodollar loop requires two moving parts: dollars earned and dollars invested. Both have stopped."
> The standard reassurance is that there is no alternative to Treasuries — no other market offers the depth, liquidity and legal infrastructure that central banks require. This remains true. Foreign central banks will not abandon Treasuries wholesale. But “no realistic alternative” and “unquestioned safe haven” are not the same thing, and the Iran war is clarifying the difference.
> As the world’s largest manufacturer of clean technologies, data on China’s cleantech exports provide an important early insight into the pace and scale of the energy transition. In 2024, China produced around 80% of the world’s solar PV modules and battery cells, and 70% of electric vehicles.
(as of this comment, China is exporting EVs at a 12M unit/year annualized run rate, with the capacity to build 50M EVs/year; they are only constrained by not enough marine vessels to keep up with export demand; every 24 months of EV production destroys ~1M barrels/day of oil demand at current run rates, which continue to increase)
Oil being settled in dollars is completely unimportant.
It makes no difference in what currency a trade is conducted.
What matters is the jurisdiction in which you store the proceeds.
That selection of jurisdiction drives everything else.
I can declare that all oil must be settled in blue seashells. Who cares? What matters is that I do not keep my profits from selling oil as a pile of blue seashells, I invest those profits in some country. As long as that country remains the US, disproportionately, then oil can be marked in British pounds, seashells, hollywood B-list handjobs, it really makes no difference at all.
But, you object, "Doesn't oil being priced in dollars mean that nations need to have dollars to buy oil?". Nope, there are forex markets. So let's look at a situation in which oil is priced in Euros but Saudi Arabia stores its surpluses in dollars.
Which currency sees an increase in demand?
Japan goes to buy oil, so it sells the Yen and buys Euros. Those Euros are handed over to Saudi Arabia, which immediately sells them to buy dollars.
So the net result is that the euro transactions cancel out and all that matters is the selling of Yen and the buying of dollars. The yen falls against the dollar and the euro goes nowhere. It's a literal null op, in terms of net demand for the currency. It means nothing. The jurisdiction in which the proceeds are stored - that is everything.
Now I would ask you, in which jurisdictions do you think Saudi Arabia can efficiently store the ten billion or so it earns each day from selling oil? Nepal? Where does it store a couple trillion dollars worth of financial assets each year? Argentina? Which nation allows such vast unrestricted capital inflows and outflows? Go ahead, make a list.
So you see, whereas one can literally invent anything in which oil is priced in, to find a jurisdiction that can accept those capital inflows, that limits you to basically a single choice. Now, given that Saudi Arabia needs (not wants, but needs) to store its proceeds in dollars, it makes sense that it would price the oil in dollars to save on transaction fees. But really it can price the oil in anything it wants, no one cares except people caught in dank youtube caverns where the ominous phrase "petrodollar" is scrawled on the walls by torchlight.
No France still needs X USD to send to Saudi Arabia for Y barrels of oil. The only way the USD becomes funny money is if SA buys X from France also denominated in USD so that the cycle is closed, otherwise France needs a continuous source of USD to send over to SA. [0]
[0] Simplifying to national here; yes it's not just one unit in France and one in SA but on net there's X trade between the major money movers in each country.
I am asking you to imagine a situation in which oil is priced in currency A but the proceeds are stored in currency B in order to determine whether it is A or B that matters, or both.
In your example, A and B are the same (dollars) and you demonstrate that there is a need for the common currency of A and B, but you are unable to distinguish between the demand caused by A and the demand caused by B, so I don't think you are groking the example. Suppose A and B were different. Oil is priced in dollars but the proceeds are stored in yen. So
1. France sells euros to buy dollars
2. France gives the dollars to KSA for oil
3. KSA sells the exact same number of dollars for Yen.
So now we see that 1 and 3 cancel the net demand for dollars to zero, and what remains is a transaction in which euros were sold for Yen, so the Yen rises against the euro and nothing at all happens to the dollar. No demand for the dollar due to oil being priced in dollars. All that matters is the currency in which you store the proceeds.
By the way, this used to be an adage of currency traders - it doesn't matter what currency a thing is priced in, what matters is the currency where you store the proceeds of the sale. This was shorthand for "the seller determines which currency gains from a trade, and the buyer determines which currency loses". So France, in selling euros for dollars, determines that euros will lose value, but does not determine that dollars will increase. It is Saudi Arabia, the seller, in choosing where to store the proceeds that determines which currency, in this case, the yen, will increase.
Also what really annoys me as a viewer is that even on a good series that has already been renewed, the waiting between seasons has crept up from 1 year (already bad) to multiple years. Then when the new season finally comes out (in two parts!) I already lost most of the context and am not nearly as interested.
The multi-year gap kills my interest. After a huge hiatus, I have forgotten key plot points, so I have to either accept that some elements will not make sense or commit to re-consuming the original season. Both of which are deeply unappealing.
I keep meaning to watch Arcane season two, but the first one was so dense (not necessarily plot, but just so many little things) that I know I would be cheating myself to watch it after the sizeable gap. Yet rewatching S1 just to start S2 is such a time commitment.
It's more than likely you're getting the first since Chinese factories simply make more of what the big brand has ordered and sell the rest to drop shippers
I don't think that's necessarily true as a general statement. There are also lots of knockoffs where they clearly aren't actually the exact same product because they're obviously slightly different in a way that shows it wasn't produced with the same dies/molds. I own several knockoffs like that (which I bought intentionally knowing they were a knockoff but the knockoff had good reviews and it wasn't worth spending extra for the original).
Occasionally there are even knockoffs that improve on the original product in some way, although usually they are just nearly as good at a much lower price.
As far as travel and hotel goes, another huge benefit is that the router enables devices without captive portal support, on a recent trip I can use:
- Fi base station for my dogs trackers (huge for me)
- FireTV stick (no need to trust hotel streaming apps will clear your credentials like they claim)
Also I can WireGuard back home automatically for select IP ranges (no need to configure WireGuard separately on many of my devices)
That's not an equivalent analogy. A better analogy would be to say I had a bank account and I told my bank to call up Joe on the phone when confirmations were needed. I still have the account, but I have fallen out with Joe. I want the bank to call somebody else, but they refused to do so, even though it's my account and I'm paying the bill for it!
Banks have established processes for changing signatories on business bank accounts, including in situations where a past signatory is no longer with the business.
In a nutshell: if a past signatory was a regular employee, it just takes any other signatory to remove them. If there was no other signatory, or if the past signatory was an officer, it takes a current officer (as set forth in the company's AOI or corporate minutes). Usually only the latter 2 situations of the 3 above require an in-person visit to the local branch office, and that only requires a few minutes.
The the war on Iran (and many years of war on terror) showed we have anything but
reply