Good news: Gulf petro-powers to launch currency in latest threat to dollar hegemony.
“The Gulf monetary union pact has come into effect,” said Kuwait’s finance minister, Mustafa al-Shamali, speaking at a Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) summit in Kuwait.
The move will give the hyper-rich club of oil exporters a petro-currency of their own, greatly increasing their influence in the global exchange and capital markets and potentially displacing the US dollar as the pricing currency for oil contracts. Between them they amount to regional superpower with a GDP of $1.2 trillion (£739bn), some 40pc of the world’s proven oil reserves, and financial clout equal to that of China.
Moves like this signal the death-knell of the kind of gross right-wing ideological economic irresponsibility we saw during the Bush administration. The eventual loss of dollar hegemony will be one of the most significant and far-reaching-into-the-future responses to the Bush era.
