Brad Setser on the War in Iran and the Future of the US Dollar
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2026
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's possible that the war in Iran could reshape financial flows in significant ways. Perhaps the Gulf states will end up as less desirable places to do business. Perhaps Iran will have a tollbooth at the Strait of Hormuz. Perhaps this episode will accelerate the world's shift away from oil. It's impossible to say. But given the uncertainty, fresh questions are being raised about the existing financial world order, upon the top of which the US dollar sits. On this episode, we speak once again with Brad Setser, the Whitney Shepardson senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. We discuss how the war is already creating new global imbalances, and the degree to which this episode parallels past energy shocks. We also talk about broader trends in reserve management, other factors driving financial flows, and the unique situation facing East Asia, which is seeing a surge in its energy import bills at the same time its making making a fortune selling chips for the AI boom.
Read more:
US Probes Suspicious Oil Trades Made Before Trump Pivots
China’s $51 Trillion Savings Help Bonds to Outperform During War
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm PJ Vote. My podcast search engine has a new two-part series for you. Of all the new technologies |
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| 0:48.2 | Music Audio Studios. Podcasts Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. |
| 0:51.4 | I'm Tracy Alloy. |
| 0:52.4 | And I'm Joe Wisenthall. |
| 0:56.3 | Joe, it is April 15th. |
| 1:03.3 | Yes. Happy tax day. Happy tax. I'm so annoyed. I'm just speaking of taxes. I'm pro-taxas, |
| 1:09.1 | but I just had an email with my accountant. Anyway, I'm pro-taxas. I resent the fact that we have to to actually file them in this massive bureaucratic exercise every year. |
| 1:13.6 | But anyway. |
| 1:14.1 | This is nothing to do with what we're talking about. |
| 1:15.7 | Well, okay, taxes, you know, financial flows of a sort. |
| 1:20.2 | Well, taxes create demand for currency. |
| 1:22.7 | Core MMC principle right there we go. |
| 1:24.8 | Okay, well, let's see. |
| 1:26.1 | It is April 15th. |
| 1:27.3 | The situation in Iran still highly uncertain. |
| 1:30.9 | Yes. Very fluid. But, you know, we have seen higher oil prices in general. We've seen people getting oil from new sources, new parts of the world. And we've seen a lot of people reaching back to the 1970s oil shock as a sort of |
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