It has been another week of crude oil records as the Nymex breached $103 per barrel and event Brent crude topped $100.

One of the reasons is that the Wal-Mart economy of the world, bargain basement U.S., has once again seen its currency rupture a little bit more. Stacking high and selling your countrymen cheap, either out on to the streets due to defaulted mortgages or on the fields of imperial war around the world is not really working as an economic plan for U.S. power.


The fall of the dollar was one of the factors - alongside Hugo Chavez and ExxonMobil’s arguments and Turkish incursions into Iraq - that popped crude oil into new territories. When an economy under performs, as the bloated, heavily-subsidised U.S. economy has done for decades, eventually something has to give.

The same thing happened in Japan, so long trumpeted as the great free market post-war miracle it was in fact an economy propped up on falsehoods. So much so that it entered a long period when its bankers sought to bail it out by making its currency so cheap to lend that anyone cold come and pick up some yen, basically for free. The famous yen carry trade.