The Death Of The Petrodollar, And What Comes After

Whatever happens, opening that contract creates a market-wide arbitrage opportunity which affords anybody with oil to sell the ability to exchange said oil for gold and anybody wanting oil to acquire it cheaply by buying cheap gold in the West and shipping it to Shanghai or HK where it can be sold for yuan.

Already, places like Tokyo, Seoul and Dubai are opening physical gold markets and discussing linking their nascent markets for bullion to the Shanghai exchange which has rapidly become the largest physical delivery market in the world.

Now, were this arbitrage to begin happening in any meaningful size, with the market for oil far bigger than that for gold, it would immediately be evident in the ratio between the two commodities...

...which, interestingly, is precisely what has happened since the peak of global reserves in 2014 and the Sino-Russian agreement to essentially transact oil for gold. With those conditions in place, the gold/oil ratio has broken out to its highest level in 80 years (chart, next page):

...which brings us right back to the question mark on the second chart which we left hanging like a matzah ball earlier in this presentation.

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