International Pirates Prowling in a Sea of Floating Currencies, p.218

Countries around the world have been caught in the same trap that captured Mexico. Henry C. K. Liu calls it the "Tequila Trap." He also calls it "a suicidal policy masked by the giddy expansion typical of the early phase of a Ponzi scheme." The lure in the trap is the promise of massive dollar investment. At first, returns are spectacular; but as with every Ponzi scheme, the returns eventually collapse, leaving the people massively in debt to foreign bankers who will become their new economic masters. The former Soviet states, the Tiger economies of Southeast Asia, and the Latin American banana republics all succumbed to these rapacious tactics. Local ineptitude and corrupt politicians are blamed, when the real culprits are international banking speculators armed with tsunami-sized walls of "credit" created on computer screens.

Targeted countries are advised that to attract foreign investment, they must make their currencies freely convertible into dollars at prevailing or "floating" exchange rates, and they must keep adequate dollars in reserve for anyone who wants to change from one currency to another. After the trap is set, the speculators move in. Speculation has been known to bring down currencies and national economics in a single day. Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa, writes:

The media tends to identify these currency crises as being the product of some internal mechanism, internal political weaknesses or corruption. The linkages to international finance are downplayed. The fact of the matter is that currency speculation, using speculative instruments, was ultimately the means whereby these central bank reserves were literally confiscated by private speculators.

While economists debate the fiscal pros and cons of "floating" exchange rates, from a legal standpoint they represent a blatant fraud on the people who depend on a stable medium of exchange. They are as much a fraud as a grocer's scales with a rock on it. If a farmer's peso was worth thirty cents yesterday and is worth only five cents today, his dozen eggs have suddenly shrunk to two eggs, his dozen apples to two apples. The very notion that a country has to "defend" its currency shows that there is something wrong with the system. Inches don't have to defend themselves against millimeters but peacefully co-exist with them side by side on the same yardstick. A sovereign government has both the right and the duty to calibrate its medium of exchange so that it is a stable measure of purchasing power for its people.

In the Eye of the Cyclone, p.302

Iran announced that it would be opening an oil market (or "bourse") in Euros in March 2006, sidestepping the 1974 agreement with OPEC to trade oil only in U.S. dollars. An article in the Arab online magazine Al-Jazeerah warned that the Iranian bourse "could lead to a collapse in value for the American currency, potentially putting the U.S. economy in its greatest crisis since the depression era of the 1930s." Rob Kirby wrote:

[I]f countries like Japan and China (and other Asian countries) with their trillions of U.S. dollars no longer need them (or require a great deal less of them) to buy oil . . . [and] begin wholesale liquidation of U.S. debt obligations, there is no doubt in my mind that the Fed will print the dollars necessary to redeem them - this would necessarily imply an absolutely enormous (can you say hyperinflation) bloating of the money supply - which would undoubtedly be captured statistically in M3 or its related reporting. It would appear that we're all going to be "flying blind" as to how much money the Fed is truly going to pump into the system . . . .

Compounding the problem, Iran and other oil producers began moving from dollars to other currencies for their oil trades. If oil no longer has to be traded in dollars, a major incentive for foreign central banks to hold U.S. government bonds disappears. British journalist John Pilger, writing in The New Statesman in 2006, suggested that the real reason for the aggressive saber-rattling with Iran was not Iran's nuclear ambitions but was the effect of the world's fourth largest oil producer and trader breaking the dollar monopoly. He noted that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had done the same thing before he was attacked. In an April 2005 article in Counter Punch, Mike Whitney warned of the dire consequences that were liable to follow when the "petrodollar" standard was abandoned:

This is much more serious than a simple decline in the value of the dollar. If the major oil producers convert from the dollar to the euro, the American economy will sink almost overnight. If oil is traded in euros then central banks around the world would be compelled to follow and America will be required to pay off its enormous $8 trillion debt. That, of course, would be doomsday for the American economy. . . . If there's a quick fix, I have no idea what it might be.

Interest and Islam, p.406

Instituting a system of government-owned banks may sound radical in the United States, but some countries have already done it; and other countries are ripe for radical reform. Rodney Shakespeare, author of The Modern Universal Paradigm (2007), suggests that significant monetary reform may come first in the Islamic community. Islamic reformers are keenly aware of the limitations of the current Western system and are actively seeking change, and oil-rich Islamic countries may have the clout to pull it off.

As noted earlier, Western lenders got around the religious proscription against "usury" (taking a fee for the use of money) by redefining the term to mean taking "excessive" interest; but Islamic purists still hold to the older interpretation. The Islamic Republic of Iran has a state-owned central bank and has assumed a lead role in adopting the principles of the Koran as state government policy, including interest-free lending. In September 2007, Iran's President advocated returning to an interest-free system and appointed a new central bank governor who would further those objectives. The governor said that banks should generate income by charging fees for their services rather than making a profit by receiving interest on loans.

That might have been one covert factor in the persistent drumbeats for war against Iran, despite a December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate finding that the country was not developing nuclear weapons, the asserted justification for a very aggressive stance against it. A paper titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses," released in September 2000 by a politically influential neoconservative think tank called the Project for the New American Century, linked America's "national defense" to suppressing economic rivals. The policy goals it urged included "ensuring economic domination of the world, while strangling any potential 'rival' or viable alternative to America's vision of a 'free market' economy." We've seen that alternative models threatening the dominance of the prevailing financial establishment have consistently been targeted for takedown, either by speculative attack, economic sanctions or war. Iran has repeatedly been hit with economic sanctions that could strangle it economically.