Okay - but singling oil out necessarily ignores all other trade, and all other commodities.
Sure, you’re on the defensive - you’re being asked to defend your position. That’s what we do here.
Your example points out that the oil producers got a bunch of cash, and that they gave it right back. And it wasn’t just money-market accounts. They borrowed from US banks - heavily. Very heavily. Those US banks made a ton of money. In the US. I’m still not sure what your point is.
If the citizens of the US took all their money out of banks, there would be no money to lend out. It’s not all Arab money.
The dollar is connected to oil, but also to everything else, precisely because it is currency. The embargo years didn’t change that - and besides, those conditions are no longer extant. It’s history.
You still haven’t established how the dollar would collapse if oil were traded in Euros. I will admit, I wouldn’t want to see that happen, but you seem to be overstating your case.
By the way, do you suppose that it is in the oil producers best interest to put the US in dire straits? Do you think they are stupid? We’d still have enough oil to bomb them into oblivion.
Is all this just some justification for invading Iraq? If we hadn’t embargoed their oil in the first place, they’d have sold it on the open market, in dollars, and we could have gotten it much more cheaply than we now do. You forget that we made them the enemy - do you really expect that they’d play ball with us under those circumstances?
The fact is that Iraq didn’t need dollars - it couldn’t have spent them. That was our own political decision - it was bad economics. We are paying heavily for that now.
I could accept all this if this guy you keep quoting says (and maybe he does) that we screwed up, royally, and we are now paying the price. But the money we could have saved by allowing Saddam to stay in power - without those economic sanctions, would go a long way towards cushioning any blow suffered by a switch to euros. Which isn’t happening, anyway.
This smacks of neo-con apologetics. The neo-cons have so far demonstrated no economic know-how. I’m not sure why we should use them as a guiding light on the economy. Maybe you should just fess up and tell us the political agenda behind all this “economics”.