Benchmark Mortgage Rate Inches Down, Poised to Drop

Well, I certainly agree that there’s going to be “turbulence ahead” in terms of mortgage interest rates, but I don’t think it has much to do with the expiration of the supposed 50-year-old agreement requiring that Saudi Arabia price its crude-oil exports in U.S. dollars. And indeed, it appears as of this writing that nasdaq.com has removed the above cave_dweller-linked article entitled U.S. Saudi Petrodollar Pact Ends After 50 Years from their website (the link above produces a redirect to their home page).

Why? Well, most likely because Reports of the petrodollar system’s demise are ‘fake news’:

Stories about the collapse of a longstanding ‘petrodollar’ agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia spread like wildfire on social media. But the agreement never existed.
…
But as speculation about an imminent end to the U.S. dollar’s global dominance intensified, several Wall Street and foreign-policy experts emerged to point out a fatal flaw in this logic: The agreement itself never existed. At least, not in the way it was being described in the posts that had gone viral on social media.
In a blog post published Friday, Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, remarked that the fake story had become surprisingly widespread, providing another lesson about the pitfalls of “confirmation bias.”
“Clearly, the story that is going around today is fake news. There was an agreement signed in June of 1974, but it had nothing to do with currencies because the Saudis carried on selling in sterling after that,” Donovan noted in an interview with MarketWatch.

Go ahead and read the whole thing. The Saudi riyal was and is currently pegged to the US dollar at the rate of 1 US dollar to 3.75 riyals, but the US Dollar to Chinese Yuan Exchange Rate is up 1.37 percent from one year ago, a few months after cave_dweller began going on about “Trade is moving away from U$D to whichever local currency or commodity is best suited…de-Dollarization gaining momentum”.