In 1974, then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew to Riyadh and struck a deal that would reshape the world order: Saudi Arabia would sell oil, accepting only U.S. dollars; and these dollars would then be recycled to purchase U.S. Treasury bonds.
At that time, Nixon had just severed the link between the dollar and gold. Inflation was spiraling out of control in the U.S., dollar reserves were depleted, gold was flowing out in large quantities, and the Bretton Woods system had collapsed. At that moment, many believed the golden age of the U.S. dollar was over.
But the deal Kissinger struck with Saudi Arabia established what later became known as the "petrodollar" system. It was this system that gave the U.S. dollar another half-century of life after the collapse of the gold standard.
This is also why any threat to block oil shipping lanes is not merely an energy issue for the United States, but a shock to the very foundation of the dollar system. This explains why the narrow, throat-like Strait of Hormuz has been regarded by the U.S. as a critical chokepoint that must be defended for the past fifty years, even resorting to military force if necessary.
Understanding this historical background helps us make sense of today's situation.
In the early hours this morning, while most of China was still asleep, a violent shock lasting less than an hour in the global crude oil futures market wiped out tens of billions of dollars in market value.
The cause was a social media post.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright posted on platform X: "The U.S. Navy has successfully escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz to ensure oil continues to flow to global markets."
After this tweet was posted, the price of WTI crude oil plummeted within minutes, at one point falling by 17% and briefly dropping below $80 per barrel. In the preceding weeks, due to tensions in the Middle East, Brent crude had just surged from $70 to $120.
For traders betting on further oil price increases, this moment was a nightmare.
However, the plot quickly reversed.
Less than an hour later, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt urgently clarified at a press briefing: the U.S. Navy is currently not escorting any oil tankers. Subsequently, Energy Secretary Chris Wright silently deleted the post without any explanation. Oil prices rebounded but failed to return to their initial levels.
One post, from publication to deletion, lasted less than sixty minutes. But the mark it left on the global financial markets far exceeded that single hour.
Since the escalation of U.S.-Iran tensions in late February, the博弈 (game) around oil has intensified. Especially after Iran announced the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the sudden closure of this narrow waterway, which handles about one-fifth of global crude oil shipments, caused a massive shock to the global energy market. As the situation escalated, international oil prices soared from $70 to $120 per barrel within days, putting the energy market in a state of high tension.
Almost every trader was waiting for the same signal: when will the Strait of Hormuz reopen. Under this collective anxiety, any slight movement could trigger violent price fluctuations. The rapid decline triggered by the Energy Secretary's post was a concentrated manifestation of this sentiment.
So, why could the oil price fall 17% in just a few minutes? Because humans can hardly react that fast, but algorithms can. A significant portion of today's financial market trading volume comes from high-frequency trading algorithms and AI trading systems. They scan the entire internet in real-time, including government officials' social media accounts, grabbing keywords and automatically placing orders.
That post contained three keywords: Navy, Escorted, Hormuz. The algorithms identified these words, combined with contextual semantics, and quickly reached a conclusion: the blockade is lifted, supply is restored, the logic for rising oil prices is weakened.
So the programs immediately sold.
All this happened in about 0.003 seconds.
The algorithm does not call to confirm if a tanker has actually traversed the strait; it only recognizes text and pursues speed. An unverified post, within this mechanistic "collective unconscious," was instantly converted into tens of billions of dollars in evaporated market value.
A real oil tanker crossing the Strait of Hormuz requires hours of sailing, actual military escort, and bears the cost of fuel and real-world risks. A post about an "escort" took only 0.003 seconds to cause violent fluctuations in the price of this major commodity.
In other words, oil, the king of commodities once dominated by supply and demand fundamentals, inventory data, and production agreements, has now, to some extent, become not much different from a Meme.
During the last U.S. election, Trump and Musk keenly sensed that this is an information age. One created Truth Social, the other bought Twitter.
And as the information age has developed to its current state, government officials' social media accounts have become one of the market's most sensitive information sources. This also means that power itself has begun to possess a certain Meme attribute: extremely fast propagation,极高 (extremely high) emotional concentration, and极易 (extremely easy) to be misread and amplified.
Traditional policy information transmission is slow and meticulous. White House statements, State Department bulletins, Defense Department press conferences—these mechanisms inherently involve verification, proofreading, and layers of confirmation. But when officials directly post policy-related information on X, these steps are skipped.
We can foresee that as we delve further into the AI Agent era, the speed of information capture and trading will increase exponentially, with sharp rises and falls occurring in mere milliseconds.
From a more macro perspective, this incident perhaps indicates a larger change: we are entering an era of "comprehensive asset Meme-ification." Almost any financial asset can, at some point, be driven by sentiment, narrative, and social media.
Kissinger used oil to extend the dollar's life for fifty years. But he probably never imagined that one day oil itself would also become a Meme.
No asset possesses a truly unbreakable fundamental moat. All moats are essentially built upon a certain consensus. And under the dual acceleration of social media and algorithmic trading, this consensus is more fragile and more dangerous than ever before.
Perhaps, in a sense, this is also the victory of the Meme.
