Did Trump's Solution to the 2024 Saudi Petrodollar Agreement Backfire?
How a war strategy may have accelerated de-dollarization instead. When the 50-year petrodollar agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia expired on June 9, 2024, and Saudi Arabia chose not to renew it, the world braced for impact. Yet the market reaction was surprisingly muted. Several factors explained the calm: The Saudi riyal remains pegged to the dollar — Saudi Arabia still needs dollar reserves to maintain that peg, limiting any immediate shift away from the currency. It was not an immediate operational shift — Saudi Arabia continued accepting dollars for oil purchases, but now had the freedom to diversify over time. Analysts viewed it as a long-term structural shift, not an immediate crisis — at the time, forecasts from institutions like Goldman Sachs and the ...