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Qatar’s oil minister said the debate was ongoing on using the US dollar for oil trade or shifting to a basket of currencies, the official Qatar News Agency reported yesterday.
A long-running debate over the currency used for commodity dealings was raised again by an article that said China, Japan, Russia and France were in secret talks with Gulf Arab states to stop using the dollar for oil trading.
Big oil producers denied it at the time, but dollar weakness has has kept the question of whether it can remain the world’s reserve currency. Producers and oil company executives on Tuesday said the dollar was likely to stay the currency of oil trade and dismissed the speculation of a shift.
“The debate continues also on whether it would be beneficial to rely on the dollar as a currency to sell oil or to search for a basket of currencies,” QNA reported HE Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah, also deputy prime minister, as saying in Italy.
Gulf Arab oil producers do all their oil trade in dollars. On Tuesday, al-Attiyah said he believed oil trade would continue as it was and that introducing another currency or basket would be difficult.
Gulf Times – Qatar’s top-selling English daily newspaper - Finance & Business
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