Oil, Gold, and the End of the Petrodollar_ The Real Venezuela Story

You already know that this weekend the United States invaded Venezuela, capturing former President Nicolas Maduro, and announced plans to run the country until further notice. But what you don't know is why and the impact it will have on you. They'll tell you that this is only about the drugs. It's not. This is a story about power, commodities, and the future of the entire global monetary system. After decades of debt-fueled paper promises, the future is being shaped by what's real and tangible. Oil, gold, silver, rare earth elements, raw materials that power modern economies and warfare. The future is commodities. And Venezuela is one of the most resource-rich countries in the world, with deep ties to China and Russia that directly challenge the petrodollar system and set the stage for consequences for your dollar, your gold, and the future of the global monetary system. But before we can break down how these moves might accelerate de-dollarization and reshape the world order, we first have to understand why Venezuela's resources are so important to the United States. And don't skip this foundational part as it sets the stage for what's coming next for the petrodollar, the future of your gold and silver, and of course, the dollars in your wallet. The United States is currently the world's largest oil producer, but not all oil is created equal. In fact, there is a huge spectrum of types of crude oil, ranging from heavy and thick goo-like crude oil to lighter and thinner. Now, lighter and thinner is typically preferred because it produces products like gasoline and diesel, whereas heavier crude oil requires far more processing and on its face produces lower value products like asphalt. But the United States produces primarily the lighter, thinner oil, which sounds like a great thing. That's the oil that everyone wants, but not so fast. Let's go back to the energy crises of the 1970s, when fear and panic around oil scarcity was at an all-time high. During this period of time, it was widely believed that the United States production of this lighter, thinner oil was in a long-term decline and that the heavier goo-like crude oil was going to be far more abundant in the future. Fearing a future where the light oil ran out, the United States made massive decades-long investments into recalibrating the refineries to process the heavier crude oil. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars to create refineries that processed oil that wasn't even produced here in the United States. But guess what? Light oil didn't run out. In fact, there's an abundance of light oil here in the United States that we can't use. And before you say, well, why don't they just switch everything back to process the light oil? It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, take decades. They would lose tons of profits in the meantime. So economically and politically, it's become a bit of a non-starter, which left the US with only one option, to import heavy crude. If you look at the breakdown of oil imports to the US since the 1970s, you can see that heavy crude oil has surged from roughly 10% of total imports in 1978 to nearly 70% today. To put it simply, the US needs heavy crude oil, and it needs it in higher and higher volumes. But here's the kicker. Again, contrary to the 1970s beliefs, heavy oil is not so abundant. It's capital intensive, difficult to extract, and located only in a few places, with the top two locations being Canada and Venezuela. Now, at one point, Venezuela was the world's largest oil exporter, but much has changed. Years of US sanctions, economic ruin, and corruption halted the industry. Without new investments, infrastructure began to decay. And as I mentioned, heavy crude oil is resource intensive. Without the investment, equipment went by the wayside. There was no new technology. And essentially, production stalled. But this wasn't just bad news for Venezuela. As I'm sure you can guess, this was bad news for the US as well. Who, as Venezuela's production has declined, has had to become increasingly dependent on Canada, which now accounts for 60% of the United States heavy crude oil imports. If the United States was going to look to diversify or find other importers of heavy crude oil and Venezuela's out, well, guess what? They don't have that many options to turn to. The next best in line would be Russia. In fact, President Trump, in a recent interview, basically said as much. Go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country. But this isn't just about oil. At the start of the video, I said that this was a story about power control and the future of the global monetary system. Since the 1970s, most all oil has been priced and sold in US dollars, an agreement commonly referred to as the petrodollar. When people say that the dollar is backed by oil, this is what they're referring to. This arrangement has essentially created an infinite demand for US dollars and US debt and kept the dollar at the center of the global financial system. But in recent years, this structure has started to crumble. In 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the freezing of US reserve assets, the entire world started to wake up to the fact that if their US assets could be frozen or seized with the push of a button, then they weren't really sovereign. This lit a fuse on de-dollarization or an effort globally to reduce the use of and the reliance on dollars as well as Western-dominated payment structure. Instead, opting for alternative payment rails, new systems, trade in local currencies, and settlement in gold. Now, it's impossible to overstate just how important the petrodollar is to the United States' success, which is why the US will do anything to protect it and why other nations who are pursuing de-dollarization are experimenting with settling oil in alternative currencies and assets. Venezuela, cut out from the US dollar system in recent years, had become part of this shift. Joining the ranks of Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, who have all already been laying the groundwork for an alternate parallel monetary system, one without the dollar. Now, the legacy media, they're not going to explain this to you. No mainstream outlet is going to tell you the impact this will have on you. But if you're watching this video, there's a good chance you already understand just how high the stakes are. As all of this continues to move forward, we can expect to see a declining demand for US debt. That declining demand will create more instability, and the United States will be forced to print more dollars to cover our deficit. But history shows us what happens when we reach this point in a currency reset, when confidence collapses. That's when you can expect to see inflation really take hold, giving way to hyperinflation or to rapid price increases, and eventually an official revaluation or devaluation of the currency. In fact, Venezuela is a textbook example. After years of hyperinflation and multiple currency revaluations, we call it lopping off zeros in this case. Imagine you had a million dollars in your bank account, and one day the government tells you, we're going to lop off three zeros. Now you go and check your account, you only have $1,000. That's what happened three times to the citizens. They learned the hard way, that if they saved their wealth in the fiat currency, well, they were left with nothing. But those who protected their wealth outside of the system with physical gold and silver, everyone who had the real deal physical gold, they saw their wealth not only be protected, but actually skyrocket on the other side compared to the failing fiat currency, giving them opportunity on the other side of the reset. Which brings us back to today and to gold. Now, Venezuela's gold has already been locked in a geopolitical battle. Some of it billions locked in the Bank of England to have refused to give them their gold back. Some are speculating that maybe this was all a master plan between England and the United States, knowing that the US was going to invade, and that the United States now has their sights set on getting Venezuela's gold. I cannot confirm or deny that. One thing that this does prove though, is just how important it is to make sure you have your physical gold, right? If you don't hold it, you don't own it, as Venezuela learned the hard way. But besides the billions that are stuck in the Bank of England, Venezuela actually has the largest gold reserves in all of Latin America. Now, again, I don't know if the United States is going to try and seize this gold, but we've made it very clear that we're at the very least going after the oil. So it's not that crazy to think that gold might be next. But either way, it's a win for the US. Whether or not we seize the gold, because you're effectively cutting Venezuela off from the other BRICS nations that are actively building a parallel monetary system that is gold-based. Now you're going to keep Venezuela into that dollar-denominated system, right? Keeping them sticking to the script versus veering off. See, China's not just stockpiling gold. I've talked about this before. I call it the Great Gold Reset. China is stockpiling gold, but they are also actively creating the infrastructure to create this new gold-based system. They're not waiting for the current fiat system to collapse and then they have something ready to go. They are creating the system as it stands today, creating the Shanghai Gold Exchange and increasing physical gold instead of paper gold. They have the Gold Corridor with vaults all across Asia, as well as creating the demand for gold by the Belt and Road Initiative, which allows settlement in, guess what? Physical gold. But let me pause. Let me ask you, can you guess who was a major participant in the Belt and Road Initiative? Who owed China hundreds of billions of dollars? Who was essentially in China's pocket for all this new infrastructure? If you guess Venezuela, you guessed correct. In fact, China was Venezuela's largest buyer of oil. Petrodollar coming back to mind, anyone? And I don't know about you, but I find coincidences these days, true coincidences to be very rare. So I do think it's odd that a mere hour, a few hours before the US captured Maduro, he was meeting with China's special representative on Latin American affairs. See, we have to remember Venezuela's not just strategically important to the US, Venezuela's strategically important to China and to the BRICS nations, not just for crude oil, but for everything else they have sitting underground, all of the other minerals, critical minerals and rare earth elements that Venezuela has, the same ones that are going to be hugely important for the future of modern technology and warfare, the same ones that China is trying to create a monopoly on for refining and processing. But not only that, if we wanna take it even a step further, allowing China or Russia to gain a foothold in Venezuela brings them really close into the Western hemisphere, not just monetarily, but military as well. There's a lot more than meets the eye on this story. But here's the part that matters the most, how it impacts you, because whether you agree with this intervention or not, which I'm not here to tell you how to feel about that, you can make that decision on your own, there is one thing we all can agree on, which is that the consequences of this do not just stay in Venezuela, they impact each and every one of us. Energy prices, your purchasing power, geopolitical dynamics, inflation, the price of gold and silver, there is a lot that is set to change from this. So let's start with first things first. The world has been moving towards de-dollarization for years. It is like a snowball rolling down the hill. It's only gaining speed and will continue to do so, especially after 2022 with the freezing of Russia's US assets, it was like pouring gasoline on a fire. And to be honest, anytime there is a massive geopolitical shock like this, all it does is wake up all of the other nations and remind them why they are fighting for a parallel system that cuts out the dollar in the first place. Make no mistake, the takeaway here for BRICS nations is not to hang up their hats and call it a day, but to work harder and faster on that parallel monetary system, the one that they are already building so that they can have a gold-based system and reduce reliance on the dollar. Now, a reduction in reliance on the dollar means less demand for US debt. I've talked about this before, but less demand for US debt means that we can expect to see our purchasing power decline. This is because the yields will go up. We're gonna have to pay investors more to take on our debt, which is going to cost us more, which means we have to print more. And you cannot create more units of an existing currency without reducing the values of the existing units, right? So that means your savings, your retirement, your paycheck, anything that is dollar denominated within this system is effectively going to be worth less. This is why gold and silver matter so much, physical gold and silver. Every currency reset throughout history, it always comes back to gold. If you wanna learn more about currency resets, the pattern they follow, the timeline and how different assets perform, we have a totally free resource. We made it free because we believe everyone should have it. It's called the Built to Endure Report. You can download it by scanning the QR code or there's a download link below. Either way, get your copy. Again, it's totally free. It's packed with 100 years of currency reset information in there. I highly recommend it to anyone out there who's watching. But I know someone out there is gonna say, wait a second, Taylor, we got the oil, we got the gold, we got the resources. Isn't this a good thing for the United States? And I understand what you're saying. But again, this is very labor intensive, time intensive, resource intensive to get the equipment to where we need it to be. We could be looking at years long. This isn't a flip of the switch where suddenly the oil's just flowing tomorrow to the US. And again, we're talking about a lot of capital. And in the meantime, this is a wake up call to every other nation out there to keep ditching the dollar and to move to gold, which they've already started. But if you don't think that this is gonna be a foot on the gas for those nations, I mean, the first thing I said when I saw the news about Venezuela was none of us have enough gold or silver, right? That was my first initial thought. And if you don't already have a strategy in place that has physical, the real deal, gold and silver in it, call us at the number below or scan the QR code. We at ITM Trading, we are a full service, physical gold and silver dealer. But we don't just sell gold and silver. We work with you to create a custom strategy, one for your concerns, your fears, as well as your goals, right? And what's coming next. We study currency resets here. It's what we do. So we are very equipped to help you like we've helped so many other people. So again, call us at the number below, scan the QR code, whatever is easiest for you. And in the meantime, thank you so much for being here. I'm Taylor Kenney with ITM Trading, your trusted source for all things gold, silver and lifelong wealth protection. Until next time.