The United Arab Emirates’ headline departure from OPEC this week has now made the case for precious metals almost too obvious. In fact, the critical USD-Petrodollar-Gold triangle just sent us one of the most important gold signals in over 50 years.
And for anyone paying attention, this should come as no surprise.
Warnings from 2022
From day one of the 2022 U.S. sanctions against Russia, we argued in “How the West was Lost” that this event marked the greatest macro-economic watershed to hit the world since Nixon decoupled the dollar from gold in 1971.
As of this week, the ripple effects of that warning just grew to wave height.
Back in 2022, we warned that trust in a now weaponized world reserve currency would fall, creating a scenario in which the BRICs+ nations would slowly de-dollarize, thereby weakening the hegemony of the USD in general and the USA in particular.
In the years that immediately followed, de-dollarization became an undeniable current, the momentum of which we have written and spoken with both consistency and conviction ever since.
Petrodollar Significance
We further warned that there would be gradual, then inevitable, threats to the Petrodollar, an essential pillar of the USD’s hegemony.
After all, forcing the world to buy oil in USDs (and oil producers to use their oil revenues to buy USTs) is indeed an “exorbitant privilege.”
The 1974 Petrodollar effectively created a global sponge for otherwise over-produced/printed Greenbacks, which explains why the U.S. could so easily export its inflation to the rest of the world with impunity for decades.
But if that “sponge” ever weakened, so too would dollar supremacy.
One simply cannot overstate enough how essential the Petrodollar is/was to the USD as a currency and to the USA as a financial hegemon.
This is why we have been tracking the Petrodollar’s post-2022 cracks here, here, here, here, here and, well… here.
In short: The Petrodollar matters; it really matters.
Petrodollar Cracks
Once the USA weaponized its already over-indebted and increasingly debased Greenback in 2022, we argued that even its oil “allies” at OPEC would eventually rethink their 1974 agreement to sell oil only in dollars.
As China openly sought a non-dollar oil solution, it was only a matter of time and circumstance before the OPEC nations would move away from the dollar and look east toward the yuan.
And as of this week, it is now apparent that each of these warnings is slowly coming to fruition.
Petrodollar Uh-Oh Moment: What Happened?
The UAE, one of America’s biggest allies, just ended its OPEC membership while simultaneously announcing to the U.S. Treasury Department that it may begin to sell its oil in other currencies.
Why?
There are many answers, but they all boil down to an increasing distrust of the USD and a decreasing respect for U.S. global hegemony/policy.
When Kissinger made the 1974 Petrodollar deal with the Saudis, for example, it was effectively a handshake deal made at knifepoint—i.e., a coerced arrangement in which the U.S. promised military protection to the OPEC members in exchange for their forced sale of oil in Greenbacks.
Fast forward some 50 years later, however, and that overly-indebted USD and increasingly impotent UST are not nearly as attractive/strong as they were in the early 1970’s.
Furthermore, the “threat of the Soviet” in 1974 is not the same in 2026 as it was in 1974.
Nations like the UAE and Saudi Arabia are no longer worried about a red star over Riyadh or Abu Dhabi, but they are certainly aware of the U.S. missiles crisscrossing their current skies in what, at least to many and for now, feels like an absolute military fiasco led by an increasingly desperate U.S.
The OPEC nations see a rich oil market in China and debt-soaked bully in an America who already has its own oil.
The UAE (already tilting into the BRICs coalition since 2024 and selling oil to India in rupees rather than dollars) is now the first nation to openly reveal that it is tired of being the dog wagged by a Petrodollar tail.
Meanwhile, even Saudi Arabia has been flirting with China for years, considering oil sales in yuan rather than dollars.
The Petrodollar: What Its Cracks Mean for the Greenback
All of this is a direct threat to an America which always assumed the world would follow its orders to buy oil in dollars and hoard USTs like dutiful serfs.
But China is no longer a serf, and has sold 48% of its USTs while looking for non-dollar oil.
As I argued earlier this year from Vancouver, John Connally’s infamous (and arrogant) declaration to the world in the 1970’s that it was “our dollar but your problem” would turn out to be an historically embarrassing and short-sighted homage to hubris before the fall.
Today, Uncle Sam’s dollar is his dollar and his problem” for the simple reason that after 50+ years of deficit spending, inflation, exporting, and oil-driven wars of “freedom and democracy,” the world no longer trusts or wants that dollar.
The Petrodollar: What Its Cracks Mean for Gold
In fact, ever since 2014, when U.S. money printing became addictive rather than “temporary,” nations slowly lost faith in Uncle Sam’s “exorbitant privilege.” They began net-buying gold (blue line) and net dumping USTs (red line) that very same year:
By 2022, of course, the net-stacking of gold by global central banks went from incremental to exponential.
Between then and now, central bank gold stacking has increased by 5X, acting as an open middle finger to the USD and UST.
Furthermore, ever since the USA weaponized the dollar in 2022, the BIS has made gold a tier-one asset, a nd even the TBTF commercial banks like UBS, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan (once intentionally complicit in downplaying gold) are now structurally bullish on the “pet rock.”
In short, the combined forces of 1) a debased and weaponized dollar, 2) a negative real-yielding UST, 3) undeniable de-dollarization trends, 4) unsustainable U.S. public debt levels, 5) a disastrous war in Iran, and 6) a now openly failing Petrodollar make it obvious (rather than debatable) that demand for, and trust in, the USD is tanking.
This slow, but oh-so predictable devolution from U.S. superpower and super-currency to a debt-desperate, debased fall is as old and familiar as history itself, a cycle I explained years ago.
Without a powerful Petrodollar to absorb its inflated and over-expanded Greenback, America’s economic and currency fall will only accelerate going forward.
As the world (and that includes a crumbling OPEC) increasingly turns its back on USDs and USTs, American bond yields and U.S. debt levels will rise as USD purchasing power falls, creating the perfect setup for more mouse-clicked trillions and a stagflation backdrop of historic proportions.
The inevitable monetary and fiscal “accommodation” (i.e., money printing) to “support” a tanking Main Street economy and entirely Fed-centralized S&P will only accelerate the debasement of an already openly debased USD.
This dollar expansion/debasement will act as a massive tailwind to gold in the years to come.
As we’ve argued for years, the inevitable decline in paper currencies fully explains the rise in physical gold, which, not so coincidentally, saw more than 50 all-time highs in 2025, for the simple reason that paper currencies were falling with equal panache.
Toward this end, the bull market in gold has only just begun.
Gold’s staying power and secular direction North (despite recent forced sell-offs) is effectively guaranteed for the simple reason that the fate of a paper currency system, debased in a backdrop of a decaying credit cycle, is now equally (and historically) unavoidable.
What we are seeing in the crumbling OPEC membership is a slow shift from dollar-backed oil to nations who will be net-settling more of their regional currency oil trades in gold, whose market cap is only a tiny fraction of the global oil market.
Slowly, gold will not only store value better than a distrusted and debased USD, but t will rise in prominence (and price) in the global oil trade.
After all, oil net-settled in gold is far less volatile than dollar-settled oil.
If we can see this, so can the oil nations of the OPEC cartel. Their move away from the dollar will be slow but brutal to a USD whose supremacy has been slowly declining for years.
After decades of hegemony, the USD is losing trust not only among American Main Streets, central banks, commercial banks, and oil nations, but also among all of us who understand the history of currency debasement, the math of gold, the theft of inflation, and the dishonesty of policymakers
In short: What we saw this week with the UAE’s infamous OPEC exit is just further confirmation of the dollar’s gradual end-game and the first innings of gold (and silver’s) winning game.
So if I understand your arguments correctly, you argue that the departure of the UAE signals the beginning of the end of OPEC and with it the petrodollar system, which will devalue USD very strong and therefore accelarete central bank reserve buying gold as well as the overall appreciaction of gold?