@RandomDamage yes but Saudi Arabia essentially controls OPEC. That's how this works.

I can pull up my links for the specifics if you're interested, but this started in the late 60s / early 70s. We entered into an agreement with the Saudis that we would sell them weapons and protect them if they made everyone in OPEC only sell oil for US Dollars. And so they did.

I think a lot of people don't realize how exactly that works. I'm just going to type this out for the peanut gallery as you might already know:

If you're a small poor country like Bangladesh you want to make things better for your people. Well, modernization in industrial and transportation requires energy, energy requires fuel, modern fuel is mostly based on oil and gas.

Where do you get your oil and gas?

You likely have to purchase it from a member of OPEC.

How do you buy it? Dollars.

How do you get dollars? You don't just to to a bank and ask them to exchange your currency for dollars. It's not magical, someone has to have the dollars. How does the Myanmar government get dollars?

Trade with the USA.

And here the sweatshops enter the conversation.

How do you get the USA to give you dollars for your goods? Sell Americans (e.g., Walmart) things like clothing that is cheaper than anyone else.

How do you make it so cheaply?

Child labor. And also just punch yourself in the face by selling at less than you could get elsewhere because you REALLY need the dollars.

So after you exploit your labor force, you can get dollars. Then you can get oil. Then you can maybe improve your country and infrastructure.


It was all a scam to extract as much wealth as possible from the rest of the world through imbalanced trade. That's what forcing everyone to use dollars for oil does.

This era is now over. The agreement expired, they are starting to buy and sell oil in different currencies now. The world is rapidly changing. The only way we can keep the dollar as the World Reserve Currency is to sanction, tariff, and threaten military force.

But it won't work for long. We can't take on everyone all at once. This will fail quicker than people expect as we have to punish ourselves in the process and we're in a very bad position to be doing that.