Written by: Jaleel Jia Liu

In 1974, then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew to Riyadh and struck a deal with Saudi Arabia that changed the global landscape: Saudi Arabia would sell oil only for dollars, and those dollars would flow back to purchase U.S. Treasury bonds.

At that time, Nixon had just severed the dollar's link to 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. In that moment, many believed that the golden age of the dollar had ended.

But the deal Kissinger struck with Saudi Arabia established what would later be known as the "petrodollar" system. It was this system that extended the life of the dollar for another half-century after the collapse of the gold standard.

Because of this, whenever someone threatens to blockade oil routes, it is not just an energy issue for the United States, but also a challenge to the very foundations of the entire dollar system. This is why the narrow waterway of the Strait of Hormuz, as thin as a throat, has been regarded by the U.S. as a crucial node to defend over the past fifty years, even resorting to military force when necessary.

Understanding this historical background allows us to grasp today’s situation well fifty years later.

Most people in China were still asleep early this morning. However, in the global crude oil futures market, a violent fluctuation lasting less than an hour had evaporated hundreds of billions of dollars in market value.

The cause was a social media post.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright posted on the X platform saying: "The U.S. Navy has successfully escorted a tanker through the Strait of Hormuz to ensure that oil continues to flow to the global market."

After this tweet was issued, WTI crude oil prices plummeted within minutes, at one point dropping 17% and briefly falling below $80 per barrel. In the preceding weeks, due to rising tensions in the Middle East, Brent crude had just surged from $70 to $120.

For traders betting on rising oil prices, that 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 conference: the U.S. Navy is not currently escorting any tankers. Subsequently, Energy Secretary Chris Wright silently deleted that post without any explanation. Oil prices rebounded immediately but failed to return to their initial positions.

A post, from publication to deletion, took less than sixty minutes. But its impact on the global financial market left traces far beyond that hour.

Since the conflict between the U.S. and Iran escalated at the end of February, the game surrounding oil has intensified continuously. Particularly after Iran announced the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which carries approximately one-fifth of global crude oil transportation, the narrow waterway was suddenly closed, dealing a significant blow to the global energy market. As tensions escalated, international oil prices surged from $70 per barrel to $120 in just a few days, putting the energy market in a highly tense state.

Almost all traders were waiting for the same signal: when the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Under this collective anxiety, any slight movement could trigger sharp price fluctuations. The rapid decline triggered by the Energy Secretary's post was a concentrated reflection of this sentiment.

So, why could oil prices drop 17% in just a few minutes? Because it's difficult for humans to react that quickly, but algorithms can. A significant portion of today's 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 algorithm recognized these words and, combining the contextual semantics, swiftly reached a conclusion: blockade lifted, supply restored, the logic for rising oil prices was weakened.

Thus, the program immediately sold off.

All of this happened in about 0.003 seconds.

Algorithms don’t make phone calls to confirm whether a tanker actually crossed the strait; they only recognize text and pursue speed. An unverified post, in this mechanism of "collective unconscious," was instantaneously converted into the evaporation of hundreds of billions of dollars in market value.

A real tanker crossing the Strait of Hormuz requires hours of navigation, actual military escort, and bears fuel costs and real risks. Yet a post about "escorting" triggered drastic price fluctuations for this commodity in just 0.003 seconds.

In other words, crude oil, once dominated by fundamental supply and demand, inventory data, and production agreements, has, to some extent, become little different from a Meme.

During the last U.S. election, Donald Trump and Elon Musk敏感ly captured that this is an information age; one created Truth Social, while the other bought Twitter.

As the information age has developed to today, government officials' social media accounts have become one of the most sensitive sources of information in the market. This also indicates that power itself has begun to possess certain Meme attributes: extremely rapid dissemination, high emotional concentration, and ease of misinterpretation and amplification.

Traditional policy information dissemination is slow and rigorous. White House statements, State Department bulletins, and Defense Department press conferences inherently include verification, proofreading, and layers of confirmation. But when officials publish policy-related information directly on X, these steps are bypassed.

What we can anticipate is that as we delve deeper into the AI Agent era, both the speed of information capture and trading will increase exponentially, with dramatic surges and drops occurring within milliseconds.

If we look at this from a broader perspective, this incident perhaps signals a bigger change: we are entering an era of "complete Meme-ification of assets." Almost any financial asset could at any moment be driven by emotions, narratives, and social media.

Kissinger used oil to prolong the life of the dollar for fifty years. But he probably did not imagine that one day oil itself would also become a Meme.

No asset has a truly unbreakable fundamental moat. All moats are essentially built upon some form of consensus. And under the dual acceleration of social media and algorithmic trading, this consensus is more fragile and dangerous than ever.

Perhaps in a certain sense, this is also a victory for Memes.

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