Susan Hayes Culleton

Why is this particularly timely to talk about now?

Right.

And I do want to get to that.

And I want to challenge several things that you've said.

So fasten your seatbelts.

But before we get to that, I also want to pick up on the point that the UAE this week has pulled out of OPEC.

This isn't without precedent.

We've had Indonesia pull out in 2016, Qatar in 2019, Ecuador in 2020, Angola in 2023.

None of those, though, were the size and the scope of the UAE.

And also, one might argue that this was coming given the tension with Saudi Arabia.

Can you give us some context of that before we go back to the point about the petrodollar?

And I definitely want to explore the swap lines.

And isn't this one of the key reasons why they did it?

But let me keep spinning the globe here and go back to the US because we've been hearing a lot about the US being a net exporter.

Therefore, that leads them to have energy security.

They're not relying on oil like, we'll say, the rest of us to come from different parts of the world.

But they can't afford, the oil producers anyway, they can't afford for oil to drop

down to your $60 a barrel, etc.

So wouldn't there be moving from one tension within the OPEC cartel to a global tension then between a producer like the UAE and the producers in the US?

Which makes it so hard to understand recent developments over the past seven weeks and decisions taken from the US.