Amid all the talk of tariffs, something far bigger is happening in the United States. Donald Trump’s current trade war is just one part of his team’s radical plan to realign the entire global economy and the dollar’s relationship in it — the biggest shift since Bretton Woods.

The petrodollar died this month -- or so I learnt via the financial blogosphere. In the past fortnight, Google searches for “petrodollar” have spiked to a record, and viral posts about Saudi Arabia ditching the greenback have ricocheted throughout commodity and currency trading rooms. Apparently, a cataclysmic event has ended American economic hegemony.

Epochal stuff — and completely false. Nonsense on stilts.

The expression "one man's trash is another's man's treasure" is near and dear to one Pennsylvania waste management facility that bridges the divide between trash and treasure on a massive scale – collecting $10 million in lost change since its inception.

"What we have is a series of assorted materials," Rebecca Guardino, Director of Ash Processing at Reworld, told FOX Business' Jeff Flock as they sorted through a bin inside the facility on Monday.

It seemed like big news, and many wondered why the mainstream media had seemingly ignored it. Turns out, there was a very good reason.

Earlier this week, reports circulating widely on social-media platforms like X offered up a shocking proclamation: A 50-year-old agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia requiring that the latter price its crude-oil exports in U.S. dollars had expired on Sunday.

Saudi Arabia’s 50-year petrodollar agreement with the US expired on Sunday, June 9, 2024, giving Saudi Arabia the freedom to sell oil in various currencies. Saudi Arabia’s decision not to renew its contract allows for the sale of oil and goods in multiple currencies, like the Chinese RMB, Euros, Yen and Yuan. This move is anticipated to speed up the use of currencies other than the US dollar in global trade.

The financial markets are bracing for disruption now that Saudi Arabia decided not to renew its 50-year petrodollar partnership with the United States, MSN reported.

This opens the door for Saudi Arabia to sell oil and other goods — instead of exclusively in the U.S. dollar — in multiple other currencies, including the Chinese renminbi, and in euros, yen, and digital currencies such as bitcoin.

Saudi Arabia’s shift to other currencies is expected to hasten the global movement away from the dollar.

Dollarization, or in the case of some Eastern European countries euroization, is an economic occurrence when foreign currency is used in parallel with the domestic currency. There are various degrees of dollarization/euroization. The reasons for this phenomenon are country-specific, but in most cases, the root cause is the instability of the domestic currency.

The U.S. is drafting sanctions that threaten to cut some Chinese banks off from the global financial system, arming Washington’s top envoy with diplomatic leverage that officials hope will stop Beijing’s commercial support of Russia’s military production, according to people familiar with the matter.

Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted last August that a drop in the importance of the U.S. dollar was "irreversible"—but there appears to be no sign that the global economy is turning its back on the greenback.

Putin's video link comments to the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summit in Johannesburg may have been another way to lambaste the West for the sanctions it has imposed on Russia, but his wish to dethrone the dollar shows no sign of coming true for the moment.

What many deemed impossible just months ago is reality: Right-wing populist Javier Milei resoundingly won Argentina’s presidency.

The fiery freshman lawmaker’s victory Sunday night has thrust the country into the unknown regarding how extreme his policies will be following a campaign in which he revved a chainsaw to symbolically cut the state down to size.