Oil prices have been rising this month, and on average rising all this year. Part of that is the expectation that summer demand will be strong. Whatever the demand, most of it will be traded in dollars.
If someone in France wants to buy oil from Saudi Arabia, they would usually use dollars, said Steve Kamin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. If someone in Mexico wants to buy oil from Norway, he said, they would use dollars too.
So even though these countries have their own currencies, they use another country’s currency — the U.S. dollar — to buy oil or gas most of the time. Why? Well, history, for one thing.
“They U.S. was originally one of the world’s biggest oil producers. We sometimes forget that,” said Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Rockefeller empire was initially…
