India to trade with Iran using national currency, not dollars

Apparently, US sanctions aren’t quite scary enough to prevent other countries from conducting commerce from Iran – and bypassing the dollar while they do it. India and Iran are saying that they’re going to trade oil, but India is going to buy that oil using rupees, instead of USD.

RT reports:

India will reportedly pay for Iranian oil in rupees as the two countries seek to bypass the US economic pressure on Tehran, industry officials have told the Sputnik news agency.

Under the deal, the payments for oil will be made through India’s state-run UCO Bank, which has no US exposure. The countries are also discussing the barter-like system to avoid US sanctions, Sputnik reports.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is on a visit to India this week, where he has met with Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj. “During the talks, the two sides also exchanged views on a further expansion of ties in banking, energy, trade, insurance, shipping, use of national currencies, Chabahar projects and Chabahar-Zahedan railway,” Zarif said in a statement.

India’s Swaraj said the country would ignore the US trade sanctions against Iran. “India will comply with UN sanctions and not any country-specific sanctions,” Swaraj said. Iran is India’s third-largest oil supplier. India bought a record 27.2 million tons of oil from Tehran during the last financial year, which ended in March 2018. It represents a 114 percent increase on the previous year.

Recently, China debuted its Petroyuan, an oil futures market using the Chinese yuan instead of US dollars. Putin has called for Russia to move away from the dollar, asked the Europeans to conduct trade with Russia using the Euro, and developed its own SWIFT system for domestic transfers in order to avoid using the American based financial processing system.

China and Russia have been moving towards doing bilateral commerce using their national currencies, also avoiding the use of the US. The more the US tries to use its currency, financial systems, and market share as a club, the more the nations of the world seek independence from it. In an economic sense, it is another way in which America is making itself irrelevant to the rest of the world.