The Venezuelan “Petro” – Towards a New World Reserve Currency?
By Peter Koenig
February 23, 2018 "Information
Clearing House"
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As this article goes to
print, Globovision TV quotes Venezuelan
President Nicolas Maduro announcing the
launch of a new cryptocurrency, the “Petro
Oro”. It will be backed by precious metals.
The launch of the new cryptomoney is
scheduled for the next week. No details of
quantities offered for sale are available at
this point.
“I do not want to rush things, but we have a surprise regarding the petro and the gold, which will have the same dimension as it has been related to oil, but it is the theme of next week,” the President says. The first public offering, the ‘Pre-sale’ of 38.4 million of the oil-backed “Petro” on 20 February, has raised US$ 735 million equivalent which is considered a great success.
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Imagine an international currency backed by energy? By a raw material that the entire world needs, not gold – which has hardly any productive use, but whose value is mostly speculative – not hot air like the US dollar. Not fiat money like the US-dollar and the Euro largely made by private banks without any economic substance whatsoever, and which are coercive. But a currency based on the very source for economic output – energy.
On February 20, 2018, Venezuela has launched
the “Petro” (PTR), a government-made and
controlled cryptocurrency, based on
Venezuela’s huge petrol reserves of about
301 billion barrels of petrol. The Petro’s
value will fluctuate with the market price
of petrol, currently around US$61 per barrel
of crude. The Petro was essentially created
to avoid and circumvent illegal US
sanctions, dollar blockades, confiscations
of assets abroad, as well as to escape
illegal manipulations from Florida of the
Bolivarian Republic’s local currency, the
Bolívar, via the black-market dollars
flooding Venezuela; and, not least, to trade
internationally in a non-US-dollar linked
currency. The Petro is a largely government
controlled blockchain currency, totally
outside the reach of the US Federal Reserve
(FED) and Wall Street – and it is based on
the value of the world’s key energy,
hydrocarbons, of which Venezuela has the
globe’s largest proven reserves.
In a first batch Venezuela released 100
million Petros, backed by 5.342 billion
barrels of crude from the Ayacucho oil
fields of Orinoco; a mere 5% of total proven
Venezuelan reserves. Of the 100 million,
82.4% will be offered to the market in two
stages, an initial private Pre-Sale of 38.4%
of so-called non-minable ‘tokens’, followed
by a public offering of 44% of the
cryptomoney. The remaining 17.6 million are
reserved for the government, i.e. the
Venezuelan Authority for Cryptomoney and
Related Activities, SUPCACVEN.
When launching the currency, on 20 February
2018, Vice-president
Tareck El Aissami declared, “Today, the
Petro was born and we will formally launch
the initial pre-sale of the Venezuelan
Petro. Venezuela has placed herself in the
vanguard of the future. Today is a historic
day. Venezuela is the first nation to launch
a cryptomoney, entirely backed by her
reserves and her natural riches.” President
Maduro has later affirmed that his country
has already entered contracts with important
trading partners and the world’s major
blockchain currencies.
Can you imagine what this means? – It sets a
new paradigm for international trade, for
safe payment systems that cannot be tampered
with by the FED, Wall Street, SWIFT, New
York courts, and other Washington puppets,
like the European Central Bank (ECB), the
unelected European Commission (EC) and other
EU-associated Brussels institutions. It will
allow economic development outside illegal
‘sanctions’. The Petro is a shining light
for new found freedom from a hegemonic
dollar oppression.
What is valid for Venezuela can be valid for other countries eager to detach from the tyrannical Anglo-Zion financial system. – Imagine, other countries following Venezuela’s example, other energy producers, many if not most of whom would be happy to get out from under the Yankee’s boots of blood dollars inundating the world thanks to uncountable wars and conflicts they finance – and millions of innocent people they help kill.
Rumors have it, that in a last-ditch effort to salvage the faltering dollar, the FED might order the IMF to revert to some kind of a gold standard, blood-stained gold. – Of the 2,300 to 3,400 tons of gold mined every year around the globe, it is estimated that about a quarter to a third is illegally begotten, so called ‘blood’ gold, extracted under the most horrendous conditions of violence, murder, opaque mafia-type living (and dying) conditions, child labor, sexual enslavement of women, many of whom way under-age, abject poisoning of humans with heavy metals, mercury, cyanite, arsenic and more, contamination of surface and underground water ways, vast illegal deforestation of tropical rain forests – and more. That’s the legacy of gold, the MSM, of course, doesn’t talk about.
That’s what the west based its monetary
system on until 1971, when Nixon decided to
replace gold with the fiat dollar which then
became de facto the world’s major
reserve currency, albeit declining rapidly
over the last twenty years. In desperation,
Washington might want to apply another
gold-based international norm to salvage the
faltering dollar. Of course, a norm designed
to favor the US, with the rest of the
western and developing world destined to
absorb the astronomical US debt.
Since the world’s major goldmining
corporation and the illegal gold-digging
mafia networks work hand-in-hand, smuggled
gold works its way intricately into the
dominium of shady traders, many of whom also
deal with so-called white gold (drug
powder), washing gold and drug-money
simultaneously, thereby confounding and
obscuring the origins of either. Eventually
this illegal gold is purchased by major gold
mining or refining corporations mixed with
‘legal’ gold, so that the illegal portion is
no longer traceable.
Therefore, every ounce of gold that would back our money, the purchases of our livelihoods would be smeared in blood, in children’s abuse and death, in murdered and enslaved women and men, in poisoned water ways and in a contaminated environment. But the world wouldn’t go for it. No more. There are healthier and more transparent physical assets to back up international currencies, i.e. the Petro, backed by energy. Though not free from socio-environmental damage, petrol-energy may gradually convert into alternative sources of energy, like solar, wind and aquatic power or a combination of all of them.
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What the world is to aim for is a monetary system based on each nation’s or group of nations or societies economic output. Today it’s the other way around – it’s the fiat money, designed by the Anglo-Zionist masters of finance, that defines economies. Thus, economies in our western world are prone to be manipulated by the rulers and their institutions – FED, IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO) – that support the debt / interest-based monetary rules – they are purposefully maneuvered into booms and busts. With every bust, more capital is transferred from the bottom to the top, from the poor to an ever-smaller elite. The energy-based Petro is a first step away from this sham.
Imagine the Petro was to become the new OPEC currency! The world would need Petros, as it used to need US dollars to buy hydrocarbon energy. But Petros are blockchain-safe, less vulnerable for manipulation. They are not coercive, they are not made for blackmailing ‘unwilling’ nations into submission; they are not tools for violence. They are instruments of equitable production and trade. They are also instruments of protection from the fiat money abuses.
The world’s ten largest hydrocarbon reserve holders
Ranking |
Country |
Petrol (billion barrels) |
1 |
Venezuela |
300.9 |
2 |
Saudi Arabia |
266.5 |
3 |
Canada |
169.7 |
4 |
Iran |
158.4 |
5 |
Iraq |
142.5 |
6 |
Kuwait |
101.5 |
7 |
Emirates |
97.8 |
8 |
Russia |
80.0 |
9 |
Libya |
48.4 |
10 |
Nigeria |
37.1 |
Total |
|
1,402.8 |
Source: TeleSUR / http://geab.eu/en/top-10-countries-with-the-worlds-biggest-oil-reserves/
have a capital base of 1.4 trillion barrels
of crude. Not bad to start a worldwide
cryptocurrency, based on energy, controlled
by energy and by all those who will use
energy – that might become a
world reserve currency,
at par with the Chinese economy- and
gold-backed Yuan, but much safer than the
fiat currencies of the US-dollar, Euro,
British Pound and Japanese Yen.
We are talking about a
seismic paradigm shift. Its potential is
unfathomable. The move away from the
US-dollar hegemony might result in an
implosion of the western monetary structure
as we know it. It may stop the predator
empire of the United States in its tracks,
by simply decimating her economy of fraud,
built on military might, exploitation and
colonization of the world, on racism, and on
a bulldozing scruple-less killing machine.
The Petro, a secured cryptocurrency based on
energy that everybody needs, might become
the precursor for an international payment
and trading scheme towards a more balanced
and equitable approach to worldwide
socioeconomy development.
Peter
Koenig is an economist and geopolitical
analyst. He is also a former World Bank
staff and worked extensively around the
world in the fields of environment and water
resources. He lectures at universities in
the US, Europe and South America. He writes
regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT;
Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st
Century; TeleSUR; The Vineyard of The Saker
Blog; and other internet sites. He is the
author of
Implosion
– An Economic Thriller about War,
Environmental Destruction and Corporate
Greed
– fiction
based on facts and on 3 0 years of World
Bank experience around the globe. He is also
a co-author of
The World
Order and Revolution! - Essays from the
Resistance.
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The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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