Dollars Before the Barrels
A supermajor agreed to pay Iraq before the oil ships. That verdict landed 6 days before the paper that names the dinar's worth.
Tuesday evening, September 8, Iraq's cabinet sat for its 18th regular session and produced eight decisions. Seven of them read like a government tidying its desk. One is the tell, and it involves an American supermajor agreeing to pay for oil before the oil ships.
Cabinet amended its own Decision 348 to authorize the Oil Ministry to sign three agreements with Chevron: an advance payment arrangement, a crude supply deal, and a technical consulting contract. Read the first one again. Dollars now. Barrels later. Trust, in writing.
There is an old rule in commodity finance, and it has never had an exception worth naming: you prepay only the supplier you trust to deliver. Nobody wires money up front to a country whose books they cannot read, whose banks they cannot trace, whose cargo might never clear a port. For 20 years that country was Iraq.
So today we set the war and the protests to the side for a moment and look at what it means when the most careful money in the oil business decides Baghdad is safe to pay in advance. Because that decision landed 6 days before the document that should price the new dinar into law.
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