Turning Hard Times Into Good Times

Robert Moriarty & Patrick Highsmith return as this week’s guests. When Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that countries unfriendly to Russia would have to pay for their oil and gas in Russian rubles, he pulled a chapter out of the U.S. playbook. In the early 1970s America arranged a quid-pro-quo agreement with Saudi Arabia whereby the U.S. used its military might to ensure the Saudi Royal family remained in power so long as it required OPEC (which it controlled) to sell oil only for U.S. dollars. The U.S. also used its military to force nations not to buy oil with euros. When the U.S. and NATO cut off all U.S. dollar payment mechanisms from Russia after that country invaded the Ukraine, understandably Russian President Vladimir Putin began holding Russian oil and gas hostage saying that he would soon refuse to release natural gas to European countries unless they paid in Russian rubles. It is well known that many European countries are highly dependent on Russian gas to not only avoid freezing t