Gold is valued in dollars. Oil is valued in dollars. Any gold for oil exchange will be decided by the going dollar rate of each. Counter parties and middlemen assisting this trade will be hedging their positions with dollar settled derivatives traded on deep and liquid dollar markets.
Oil is primarily transacted with dollars because it’s the worlds reserve currency. But if that were to change to whatever, you can still sell your oil and gold for whatever the new dominant currency is. Meanwhile your dollar is (presumably in this case) worth way less in terms of buying power than when you first bought it.
To see an actual switch from usd to gold for valuing oil, you’d need to see the market liquidity migrate from usd/oil pairs to gold/oil pairs. Ghana making a political statement isn’t that.
If a long term contract is signed it protects you from dollar's inflation/volatility as the contract used gold as currency. I think this is important as tomorrow Fed's decision is no longer that important for your energy costs.
The more important part is that if enough contracts are signed in gold(highly unlikely given U.S's oil exports) then the dollar is no longer relevant to the oil price.
The Fed decision wasn't important to energy costs anyway, though. Oil is priced in dollars, but the price changes minute-to-minute. Whatever the Fed decides about the value of a dollar, the oil price will reflect that.
If you're involved in a long-term contract involving the exchange of oil for dollars, then the Fed's decision can have a big impact on you. But that's true of all long-term contracts involving dollars; there's nothing special about the other side of the contract being oil.
Of course it was. Rate hiking makes the dollar more expensive for anyone buying dollars(to pay for the oil). Were they dealing with gold they would not have this issue. Not to mention if the buyer is a gold producer.
So even if you are signing contracts in gold/oil pairs, effects of fed decisions can impact your trade in ways that you are protected from in usd/oil pairs as gold is usually viewed as a safety asset - so when animal spirits take off due to fed statements gold can go down while oil takes off. This has in fact happened several times over the last decades.
What Ghana is doing is a symptom of global liquidity crisis not a dollar crisis... Ghana cannot print dollars... It is short dollars and would rather have more then less of dollars. So this situation makes dollar more wanted not less.
Michaell Howell is an expert on Global Liquidity and does good job at explaing it.
https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/global-liquidity-matters-no...
I think you are mistaken.
The technical fungibility of dollars/gold/oil is irrelevant.
The requirement to sell other assets to buy dollars in order to settle oil is not a minor detail - it's the whole point ...
... and it would, indeed, be a sign of an erosion of US currency and trade dominance ... which is why it's not going to happen.
Ghana will either not go through with this plan or they will proceed and pay an enormous economic and political price ... or worse.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2022/10/05/opec-thumbs-...