In a massive geopolitical earthquake, the United Arab Emirates announced it is leaving the OPEC oil cartel.

Coincidentally, this happened just days after the UAE negotiated currency swap lines with the U.S. Treasury. In other words, Trump did a deal.

Get this: according to the Times, “the U.A.E. gave less than a week’s notice, saying it would leave on Friday.” 

The speed of Trump. Buh-bye, suckers.

• It is hard to oversell this story. 
• For our entire lives, we’ve lived at the mercy of OPEC’s price-setting and heard about the “petrodollar” until we wanted to start gushing our guts out... 

It is hard to imagine how the monopolistic Middle East oil cartel can continue without UAE (or rather, in competition with it).

• So this news marks the beginning of the end of the petrodollar era and a death blow to OPEC’s control over global oil supply. 

It also proves that the Trump administration’s strategy of forging strong bilateral alliances in the Middle East is paying off, effectively breaking the cartel’s generations-long stranglehold on energy markets...