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That's a fair point about the currency, but what the hell is the Euro anyway? The power of the marketplace is that it (usually/eventually) gets over these kinds of artificial constuctions.
uninformed speculation follows
In the long run I have no doubt that the US will outgrow Europe, no matter what Europe does. At their heart, they are risk-averse bureaucrats and S*c**lists. Recent EU regulators said that all pig farmers have to supply their pigs with play toys. You and I laugh riotously... even the US D of Ag doesn't create such nonsense and would never ever even think of trying. EU regulators seek to cut themselves off from the rest of the world...
Seriously, there will not be a time when we send $25 (or whatever) to Saudi Arabia and they do not send back a barrel of light sweet crude. If they want to refuse our dollars it will be to their peril. Someone else will want them, if not another oil seller, another seller of something else who will also want to use those dollars to buy oil.
Oil drives the economy to some degree, but there are all kinds of weird factors built in to the price. F'rinstance, I had no idea -- it turns out that the real reason why we are "dependent" on foreign oil is because it is cheap. When it becomes expensive, it becomes more economically viable to pump oil out of Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. Also, turns out the oil under the mideast is higher quality, easier to refine and easier to dig for. (It's under SAND.)
So if they don't take our dollars in the mideast, and the price of oil jumps for us, it means we go retrieve our own stuff. But is the supply limited? I've heard from two vastly different sources that some domestic oil wells are REFILLING - WTF?? - and that the Gulf oil reserve might be simply gigantic but that we don't look for it because right now it's cheaper just to pay the Sauds for theirs.
(BTW funfact - if you don't want to buy gas refined from mideast oil, buy Sunoco.)
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