There has been much debate lately on the matter of Iran’s plans to open their own mercantile exchange

There has been much debate lately on the matter of Iran’s plans to open their own mercantile exchange,

an oil bourse, and perhaps not coincidentally, talk of imminent war.

As John Pilger wrote earlier this week,

“[Blair] knows the real reasons for an attack and the part Britain is likely to play. Next month, Iran

is scheduled to shift its petrodollars into a euro-based bourse. The effect on the value of the dollar

will be significant, if not, in the long term, disastrous. At present the dollar is, on paper, a

worthless currency bearing the burden of a national debt exceeding $8 trillion and a trade deficit of

more than $600 billion. The cost of the Iraq adventure alone, according to the Nobel Prizewinning

economist Joseph Stiglitz, could be $2 trillion.”

The idea is that if Iran opens their own market and begins to denominate their oil sales in euros, it

could cause the different governments of the world to divest some of their dollar holdings so that they

can instead save euros for the large transactions, and that this could threaten the hegemony of the US

dollar – which, of course, is just a lousy piece of paper backed up by police power.

If the world were to abandon the US dollar as the reserve currency, all those dollars would come

floating home, causing massive inflation.