Book

Description

In 1974, with no treaty and no vote, the United States turned the price of oil into the foundation of its power: every barrel would be sold in dollars, and every nation that burned energy would be taxed — quietly, permanently — in forced demand for American debt. For fifty years the arrangement held, not because it was natural, but because nothing could replace the financial plumbing beneath it. That is no longer true. The Petrodollar Fracture is a rigorous, first-principles anatomy of how a monetary empire ends. Moving from the mathematics of the "hegemony discount" — the hidden subsidy worth trillions to the U.S. Treasury — to the game theory of a single toll booth at the Strait of Hormuz, Suyash Mishra shows that the dollar order can be unwound not by armies but by incentives: an institution so precisely engineered that every rational shipper, insurer, and trader chooses its rival currency of their own accord, and the arithmetic does the rest. He models de-dollarization as a self-exciting cascade in which each crisis makes the next more likely, proves that the financial weapon corrodes itself the moment it is used, and maps the two-bloc world that emerges from the wreckage. At the center of that world stands India — the third-largest oil importer on Earth, indispensable to every side, and, if it moves before the choice is made for it, uniquely able to profit from a fracturing order rather than be crushed by it. Part geopolitical thriller, part operating manual for monetary statecraft, this is the essential account of the most consequential financial transition of our time.