Tag Archives: Geopolitics

We have seen several explanations for the financial crisis and its lingering effects depressing our global economy in its aftermath. Some are plain stupid, such as greed for some reason suddenly overwhelmed people working within finance, as if people in finance were not greedy before 2007. Others try to explain it through “liberalisation” which is almost just as nonsensical as government regulators never liberalised...

Oil exporters recycled their dollar in US treasuries During the reign of the mighty petro-dollar standard, it was necessary for major oil exporters to recycle their dollar holdings back into the dollar-based financial system to maintain their self-imposed exchange rate pegs. US government bonds are the very centrepiece of this elaborate system and it is thus no surprise to see the dollar price correlate well with overall OPEC TSY holdings. In other words, when oil prices were high, oil...

Another month, another OPEC meeting beckons for 2nd June. But unlike typical meetings on the Danube (let alone dust filled haze of Doha), the producer group might just have a new King in town. It comes in the form of Russia; the number one global producer that’s not even technically a member of the cartel. Confused? Don’t be. The argument is quite simple. Irianian and Russian Crude/Condensate Production Iranian and Russian Crude/Condensate Production – click to enlarge. Unlike...

As expected, Iranian Prime Minister Abadi was always going to come off worse in his last ditch attempt to try and regain some kind of political initiative by appointing a new look ‘technocratic’ government in Baghdad. But the ailing Prime Minister has managed to back himself into a particularly tight corner after being outplayed by Muqtada al Sadr, Iyad Allawi and even Nouri Al Maliki. Rather than sticking to his ‘technocratic guns’ Abadi blinked first on cabinet changes, by allowing more...