[themihai]

>> Gold is valued in dollars. Oil is valued in dollars.

If a long term contract is signed it protects you from dollar's inflation/volatility as the contract used gold as currency. I think this is important as tomorrow Fed's decision is no longer that important for your energy costs.

The more important part is that if enough contracts are signed in gold(highly unlikely given U.S's oil exports) then the dollar is no longer relevant to the oil price.

[simple-thoughts]

Most dollars are created by offshore banks and are not backed by deposits at the federal reserve. The federal reserve only indirectly affects the value of dollars through manipulating inflation expectations. If people think the fed is easing, they buy assets which pumps the collateral of offshore banks which then have larger balance sheet capacity to issue new dollars backed by that collateral.

So even if you are signing contracts in gold/oil pairs, effects of fed decisions can impact your trade in ways that you are protected from in usd/oil pairs as gold is usually viewed as a safety asset - so when animal spirits take off due to fed statements gold can go down while oil takes off. This has in fact happened several times over the last decades.

[thaumasiotes]

> I think this is important as tomorrow Fed's decision is no longer that important for your energy costs.

The Fed decision wasn't important to energy costs anyway, though. Oil is priced in dollars, but the price changes minute-to-minute. Whatever the Fed decides about the value of a dollar, the oil price will reflect that.

If you're involved in a long-term contract involving the exchange of oil for dollars, then the Fed's decision can have a big impact on you. But that's true of all long-term contracts involving dollars; there's nothing special about the other side of the contract being oil.

[themihai]

>> The Fed decision wasn't important to energy costs anyway, though.

Of course it was. Rate hiking makes the dollar more expensive for anyone buying dollars(to pay for the oil). Were they dealing with gold they would not have this issue. Not to mention if the buyer is a gold producer.

[thaumasiotes]

So what? Rates go up, dollars get more valuable, it's more expensive to buy dollars than it used to be, and each dollar buys more oil than before.

[themihai]

But only one entity prints dollars so that's the catch/unfair advantage of the U.S.

[samus]

The Fed has a huge influence of course, since they are the largest issuer and politically close to the authority that determines what a dollar is. But Dollars are also created by other banks on their balance sheets, many of them outside the US.

[thaumasiotes]

What are you saying? Does that have anything to do with the decision on interest rates? How does the interest rate decision affect the real price of oil?