The twenty-second Bilderberg Meeting was held at the Grand Hotel Saltsjobaden in Saltsjobaden, Sweden, on 11, 12 and 13 May 1973 under the chairmanship of H.R.H. The Prince of the Netherlands. There were 80 participants, drawn from a variety of fields: government and politics, universities, journalism, diplomacy, industry, transport, trade unions, the law, banking, foundation administration and military service. They came from thirteen Western European countries, the United States, Canada and various international organizations and met privately to plan the New World Order.
A “400% increase in the price of OPEC oil in the very near future” was discussed and how they should handle the influx of petrodollars that would come from the revenues and introduced “recycling petrodollars”. The secret coup to increase the price of OPEC oil by 400% would save the devaluing dollar and preserve its position as the reserve currency of trade and in Central Bank Reserves worldwide, halt the booming European economy, smashed the developing countries which were experiencing a rapid growth dynamic, and ultimately sway the power back towards Wall Street and the mighty dollar that’s created from nothing.
In the words of William Engdahl:
There was a meeting – and some people might get scared off and say this is conspiracy theory, but I am in possession of the actual confidential documents that quite legally came into my possession by chance in Paris years ago: the protocol from the May 1973 meeting of the Bilderberg Group in Saltsjobaden, Sweden. I have the attendees list from the Hoover Institute of War and Peace in California, I have the facsimile of the American secretary to the Bilderberg about which guests would be invited including Henry Kissinger from the American side to this May meeting. And in there, if you make the calculation, they listen to a presentation and debate, and these are some of the most powerful people in Europe and the United States – hand-picked by David Rockefeller by the way. The heads of all the major oil companies, the Seven Sisters, were also in attendance. They talk about what amounts to a 400 per cent increase in the price of OPEC oil in the very near future. Of course, they do not give specifics, but they talk in the abstract.
The entire discussion was not how do we as some of the most powerful representatives of the world’s industrial nations convince the Arab OPEC countries not to increase oil prices so dramatically. Instead they talked about what do we do with all the petrodollars that will come inevitably to London and New York banks from the Arab OPEC oil revenues. Henry Kissinger, who coined the term after the oil shock in 1973/74, talked about “recycling petrodollars.” And in fact what happened was – and this came directly from Sheik Yamani privately in a discussion with me at his home in 2000, he said:
“I was sent by my King, the Saudi King, as a trusted emissary to talk with the Shah of Iran and ask the Shah why at the September 1973 OPEC meeting after the Yom Kippur war he was adamant about such a huge OPEC price increase as a permanent price.” And he said: “The Shah turned to me and said: ‚Tell His Excellency, the King of Saudi Arabia, if he wants to have an answer to that question, he must go to Washington and ask Henry Kissinger.’” In other words, this was dictated to the Shah.
So this oil shock came two years after the free floating of the dollar, when the dollar was essentially falling like a stone, because the U.S. economy was starting to show major ruptures from the Post-World War 2 period when the U.S. industry was world class leading industry and the gold reserves and everything else was in an ideal correlation to one another, the U.S. economy was coming into very, very severe structural problems in the early 1970’s. So the dollar was falling and the French and the German economies were really beginning to boom as was the Japanese economy, and certain elites connected with the money center banks in New York, I think, decided that it was time for a major shock to reverse the direction of the global economy, even at the cost of a recession in the American economy – that didn’t concerned them so much as long as they were in control of the money flows.
Back in 1975, Washington sent a very senior Treasury official to Riyadh, and essentially told Riyadh that OPEC was not to sell a single barrel of oil unless it is priced in dollars, because at that time the German government, the French government and the Japanese government were all knocking on the door of OPEC, promising their quality machine-tools, the excellent high-quality German machine tools, French or Japanese trade that the Middle East countries so dearly wanted to build up their economies. But they asked it be sold against oil prices in their own currencies so they would be less dependent on the dollar. At that point, Washington intervened and said: “That’s a no-no. Oil must never be sold except in dollars.“
Why was this of essential importance to the U.S.?
FWE: Because since 1945, U.S. power projection in the world has rested on two pillars. One pillar is that the U.S. has the overwhelming military might on this planet. Today it spends more on military equipment, personal and power projection than the next 42 countries in the world including Russia, China and all of Europe combined! The second pillar of U.S. power is the role of the dollar as the world reserve currency. Both two have a combined synergy. If anyone wants to understand the power of “the American Century,” as Henry Luce, the owner of Time magazine, called it in 1941, then they have to look at these twin-pillars and how they both interact.
The oil price jumping by 400 per cent in 1973/74 saved the dollar. The dollar had floated up on a sea of oil. Again, we have to remember that Nixon broke the link of the dollar with gold unilaterally in August of 1971, and after that time it plunged by some 40 per cent against major trading currencies like the Deutsche Mark and the Japanese Yen. What saved the dollar, what saved Wall Street and the power of the dollar as a financial thing, but not the U.S. economy by any means, was the 400 per cent OPEC price shock. That halted growth in Europe, it smashed the developing countries, which were enjoying a rapid growth dynamic by the early 1970’s, and it retilted the power balance back into the direction of Wall Street and the dollar system.
So if you look at the whole ensuing history of the 1970s into the 1980s Latin American debt crisis or Third World debt crisis, which also destroyed Yugoslavia, Poland and some other East block countries as well, that was all about recycling petrodollars through the euro-dollar banks, U.S. banks in London, British banks. This was the heart of the so-called eurodollar market then, the City of London. – as well select banks like Deutsche Bank, UBS and a couple of Japanese banks were junior partners in this.
But the main thing was: the Anglo-American banking elite recycled the surplus dollars that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Emirates and all the other OPEC countries including Iran until the fall of the Shah circulated. By the way, the Shah himself ran all of the oil profits of the Iranian oil company through one single bank, and that was Chase Manhattan Bank of David Rockefeller – interesting fact of history. So through the recycling of Petrodollars, the dollar was tied to the price of oil and the oil majors, the Seven Sisters, the U.S. and British oil majors, really controlled the price of oil. They blamed it on the Arab sheikhs, but the control lay in New York and London.
Today, I think the U.S. is going to do everything in its power to keep oil priced in dollars, but the role of the oil price in dollars is not as strong as it was in the mid 1970’s, because of the emergence of these futures markets controlled by banks such as Goldman Sachs—the advent of so-called “paper oil“. With that control of futures like ICE Futures in London they can ramp up the price of oil, as they did in 2008 with a price of $ 147 and then crash it down to the high 30’s. For what reason? They knocked the wind out of Russia’s sails at the time when Putin and Medvedev were using oil and gas export to create a major counter-pole to U.S. power in the world.
