It has been exactly 135 issues since we last touched on the ongoing story of China beginning to value oil contracts in yuan instead of USD here at the Ƀent. Today seems like a great day to check in and see what's been going with this story. As our friend @arbedout points out in the above tweet, it looks as if Iran and China are cozying up to each other as the US and a few allies attempt to enforce economic sanctions and launch a trade war against them.

As their hands are being forced, China and Iran are looking to trade oil in yuan-denominated contracts to skirt the need to use USD-denominated contracts. While this isn't going to cause a collapse of the dollar overnight, the ever so slightly increasing influence of yuan-denominated oil futures contracts has an acidic effect on the petrodollar's dominance over oil trade. It will be interesting to see how this story progresses in the future. It may turn out to be a great case study in poor decision making on the geopolitical stage as, again, the US seems to be putting some countries in positions in which they have no other options than to skirt the petrodollar.

Beautyon succinctly describes how Bitcoin may help alleviate the pain points of international oil trade in the thread below.

Does this seem like a plausible future to you freaks?

(Peep the original Atlantic Council article here.)

Final thought...

I had some suspicious sausage last night. Feeling a bit queasy this morning.