It just might be the biggest financial story of the decade…

And almost no one is writing or talking about it.

Not CNBC or Fox Business. Not The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal.

Even among the CEOs of gold mining companies, they’re largely oblivious. But someday we’ll look back and say this event scrambled the global economic order…

…and put gold center stage in the geopolitical spotlight once again.

So what’s the big news?

The Dollar Game Changer

China is about to launch its so-called “soft weapon” on the dominance of the U.S. dollar.

That weapon, according to Nikkei Asian Review
, is a “crude oil futures contract priced in yuan and convertible into gold.”

It’s a huge development. As a former financial journalist, I heard pitches for years about the imminent death of the dollar. The dollar certainly had its ups and downs in that time, but the greenback is still entrenched as the world’s reserve currency. Why?

In part, it’s because the dollar’s advantage was built into global trading systems. The world still runs largely on oil. If you want to buy or sell petroleum on the world market, the worth of every barrel is quoted in U.S. dollars.

It doesn’t matter whether the oil was pumped out of the ground and benchmarked as West Texas Intermediate, or as international petroleum grades like Brent blend, Dubai crude or Malaysia’s Tapis crude.

They’re all priced in dollars.

So now along comes China. The message with its new yuan-based, gold-convertible oil contract?

“You now have a choice. Come to Shanghai, come to Hong Kong, trade oil here, and sidestep the entanglements and burdens (and economic sanctions) that come with doing business in the American currency.”

And what if you don’t like the idea of holding your oil wealth in China’s currency, the yuan?