Gold serves no/little purpose in working capital/cash these days.
Murdock's right about the use of fiat (funny) money, which is based upon labor output or credit lending.
Just because Gaddafi was rallying African oil nations around a gold based "self determination" plan doesn't mean that he was acting in their best interests any more than the pied piper was working in the best interests of the villagers.
The US likely wanted both gold and oil assets secured.
If anything, this is reassuring to me because if the US was interested in sending the world into an economic tailspin to keep emerging nations, especially BRIC, from competitively out-consuming natural resources then ALLOWING Gaddafi to force oil purchasing nations to go back to a gold standard really would have made a mess of the global economy.
By preventing that the US has confirmed that it's actually trying to not f#ck things up, which I'll be the first to propose it is/was up to.
(I'm strangely disappointed, actually).
US just wants to use up everyone else's oil before using up its own.
Plain and simple.
Arguing that payment in gold instead of dollars or euros is retarded.
What do you think anyone was going to buy the gold with? Dollars. Euros. Yen. Yuan.
What do you think Gaddafi or African oil cartels were going to do with mountains of gold? Trade it for what? Buy what with it? From whom? When other nations bought gold with their local currencies what were gold producing nations going to do with those currencies? Purchase gold?
The whole one-step-only argument (quality news reporting, BTW) is just one step shy of being stupid.
And before anyone starts bandying about US political party arguments don't forget this whole oil obsession was validated by the establishment of the
Carter Doctrine.
If armchair American politicians wanna get off their fat, lazy assets and get our noses out of everyone's business they should contact their state representatives and provide a sane argument for politically and economically isolating ourselves and begin consuming our own natural resources at a faster rate before anyone else gets hurt.
D@mmit. We have soccer moms to transport and band practices to attend.