When OPEC raised the price of oil in October 1973, purportedly as a political weapon over the Yom Kippur war, it did not do so as a chal­lenge to imperialism. Indeed, despite the confrontationist rhetoric of Gaddafi and others, OPEC's Saudi anchor derived advantages for the U.S. government in an intraimperialist show of force. In 1971 , when President Nixon delinked the dollar from the gold standard, the administration puzzled over strategies to exert power over the global economy. One of these was a rise in the oil price, which would, the Nixon administration surmised, do at least two things for the United States: put an immense squeeze on the two main economic competitors, Western Europe and Japan; and earn profits for the oil lands, which would, in all probability, be recycled into U.S. financial institutions because the Gulf states, at least, did not have adequate productive capacity to absorb the petro-profits. The elimination of capital controls in the U. S . economy by 1974 further facilitated the recycling of these petro-profits (then held almost exclusively in dollars), and therefore the global enhancement of the status of the dollar as the instrument of "hard currency." Since the oil states held their main currency reserves in dollars, it behooved them to help stabilize the U. S . economy (and work against the depreciation of the dollar, which contributed to the deindustrialization of the United States). The 1973 price rise certainly improved the position of the oil lands momentarily, but in the long run it benefited the U.S. government and the major transnational firms that did business in dollars. Despite the best intentions of the public cartel, then, it did not necessarily incon­venience or challenge the structure of imperialism.