Susan Hayes Culleton

I'm Susan Hayes-Cullerton.

Now for my trivia this week.

I went out for breakfast with my mum and dad last Saturday morning in an Irish town.

And based on what I'm about to tell you, can you guess which one?

In this town, the founder of the US state of Pennsylvania was born.

It was the first town in Ireland to have electric street lighting back in 1899.

And it's home to Ireland's only toy soldier factory with a huge exhibition of the Battle of Waterloo.

Have a think and I'll give you the answer at the end of the show.

Now, the world processed the news this week that the United Arab Emirates is pulling out of OPEC in yet another development in oil market turbulence.

However, there is far more to this than simply a change in the price of oil or even the supply of it.

So to take a deep dive into the concept of the petrodollar, I'm delighted to be joined by Brendan Greeley, contributing editor with the Financial Times and author of the soon-to-be-published The Almighty Dollar, 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money.

First up, Brendan, can you explain to our listeners what is the petrodollar?

What's the concept of it?

OK, just before you go on there, I just want to interject here for a moment.

So are you telling me that I know we're predating here before the euro, but let's just say the ECB existed at the time.

that the ECB could print dollars without even notifying the Fed and print dollars.

When you say they were making the currency up, I just want to make sure that we're clear on what we're talking about here.

They could print dollars and then turn them into money and then that became an asset and liability on the balance sheet of the ECB.

But doesn't it also then create the risk that if I was to go rogue, and I would need to be obviously a very big state in order to do this, I could print enough dollars to completely sink the value of it?

And so if we bring this now to why you were writing about this in the FT this week, given the fact that we are focusing a lot on the war in Iran, the impact of the, like I mentioned there, the oil price turbulence and so on.