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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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The US has seemingly defied every prediction of its debt being unsustainable.

To his credit, Trump is working on that. The oil trade was long denominated in dollars because the US had an outsized influence on it. Being readily convertible to fossil fuels is one of the reasons why the US$ made a good reserve currency, which is a reason why many countries are stockpiling it and thus subsidizing the US debt (as inflation slowly eats up the value of their dollar reserves).

Under Trump, the US has not been a good steward of the global oil trade. When Iran predictably closed the Strait (because this is the one way they can exert pressure on the rest of the world), Trump loudly declared that this was not his mess to fix. Let Europe deal with it if they want the oil. And I am sure that Europe will deal with it eventually, though not through military means. At the end of the day, we will probably just pay Iran to let the ships through. But at that point we might decide to trade the oil in yuan instead.

After all, China seems like a sane, reliable superpower. Sure, they are troublesome for their neighbors (Taiwan first and foremost, though Venezuela might claim that their regional superpower does not respect the autonomy of smaller states), but unlikely to invade Spain or Germany. So far, China has refrained to wreck the world economy in some military adventure.

But at that point we might decide to trade the oil in yuan instead.

Come on man, at least ask an AI if this is plausible before suggesting it. China exercises capital controls, if they allowed free convertibility then Chinese people could invest overseas and earn better returns than their horrific internal market which would collapse their whole investment model. And you can see how China has treated Australia or Lithuania using their economic influence when the nations displeased them, the devil you don't know is hardly some stable partner.

You could maybe make an argument for a euro swap but it has its own problem, like that there isn't one unified euro bond market, each state has its own so there is no equivalent to a US treasury. And to be a reserve currency you need to have a huge amount of outstanding accounts, There literally are not enough euros in existence to make this kind of thing work and the process of printing and spending them would very likely wreck the European economy.

Finally Who is protecting the rest of the seas? Who owns the other straights? If we're going to enter a US isn't responsible for foreign shipping protection and in fact being able to threaten shipping entitles you to extracting rents from shipping then I know of an entity that is able to threaten every ship everywhere.

The US dollar, bond yields, and S&P 500 have held up well despite oil having gone up so much, suggesting market participants are not concerned.

https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/TVC-DXY/?timeframe=1M

People again have made this argument of the US losing the petrol dollar and it has not borne out