Got this from Scott Loughrey on his News_Junkie_GP Listserv.

Despite repeated reports over the past 18 months or so that the planned bourse would finally open for business on March 20, 2006 — and go head to head with the New York Mercantile Exchange and the ICE Futures Exchange in London — the start date has been postponed by at least several months and maybe more than a year.
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The theory is that all trades through the new bourse would be made in euros, not the U.S. dollar, which for decades has been the world’s primary reserve currency, as well as the one in which oil and most other commodities have been priced. As a result, European nations and other countries, especially Middle East oil producers, tired of having to buy billions of now weakening greenbacks to pay for their energy purchases, would no longer have to do so.

This, the conspiracy theorists contend, would knock the stuffing out of the U.S. currency and hasten the decline and fall of the American Empire, all the while allowing Iran to stick it to the Great Satan.

But, the theory continues, Washington will pre-empt all this by using Iran’s nuclear ambitions as a pretext for attacking the country.

http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/article_14125.shtml