A lot of new headlines today. Here's the connecting arc I see joining a combination of accelerating trends:
1) The reason Iran is so boldly restarting their uranium enrichment program is the backing of China. In exchange, China gets access to Iran's oil and a foothold in the Middle East oil hot bed. (Last year Iran and China signed an ambitious agreement, under which China may buy as much as $70 billion of Iranian liquefied natural gas over the next 30 years, while developing a large Iranian oil field.)
2) Yes Oil prices are rising - topping $65 a barrel today, but the real back story is what does this do to the value of the dollar and the US economy? Read this article from 321energy.com What happens when oil does peak?
3) I have been reading for a while about the risk of global warming becoming a runaway positive feedback loop due to the release of large quantities of frozen methane that is trapped in arctic regions. It appears that this is not theory but fact - as the Guardian reports it is happening on a large scale in Siberia. This news is staggering in its' implications.

Of these news items the financial issues described in item 2) particularly need to be looked at closely. I would suggest that if things get ugly in the market, do NOT put your trust in government bonds. To incite you to read the links above please peruse these excerpts:

"Although the initial effect of higher oil prices is inflationary, ultimately the result is deflation. Deflation in growth forecasts, deflation in stock prices and deflation in jobs. That means overall tax-take will be lower than he expected, which in turn means his budget deficit will remain high.
Consequently, a declining supply of oil must be accompanied by either a declining supply of money or by hyperinflation. In either case, the result for the global banking system is the same: total collapse. This may be what led Stephen Roach, the chief economist for investment bank Morgan Stanley, to recently state, "I fear modern day central banking is on the brink of systemic failure."

Within a few months of global oil production hitting its peak, it will become impossible to dismiss the decline in supply as a merely transitory event. Once this occurs, you can expect traders on Wall Street to quickly bid the price up to the $200 per barrel range as they realize the world is now in a state of permanent oil scarcity.

With oil at $200 per barrel, gas prices will hit about $10 per gallon virtually overnight. This will cause a rapid breakdown of trucking industries and transportation networks. Importation and distribution of food, medicine, and consumer goods will grind to a halt. The collapse will be hastened by the fact that the US national debt will become completely unsustainable once the price of oil gets into the $100 range.

Once this mark is passed, the nations of the world will have no choice but to pull their investments out of the US while simultaneously switching from the dollar to the euro as the reserve currency for oil transactions. Along with the breakdown of domestic transportation networks, the global financial shift away from the dollar will wholly shatter the US economy.
Every dollar increase in the price of a barrel of imported oil increases the size of the U.S. trade deficit, which puts more pressure on the value of the U.S. dollar, which leads to a weaker dollar, which makes OPEC countries want to raise the dollar-denominated price of a barrel of oil to make up for the dollar’s fall, and so on." -Joel Bainerman

And this from Richard Heinberg at MuseLetter.com about the value of the dollar.

"To understand why the dollar is America's Achilles heel, a metaphor is useful. Imagine being able to write checks and then convince the people you give them to not to cash them. Perhaps they find the checks themselves comforting to hold onto; or maybe you have a friend who agrees to sell groceries or gasoline for your checks only, and then happily stockpiles and re-circulates them. In either case, you may be tempted to write checks for much more than you have in your bank account. As long as the checks themselves are regarded as valuable and not cashed, you get a free ride. But if people stop finding your checks comforting to hold onto, or if your friend starts selling groceries for other people's checks or for gold or silver, then the game is up. It will be revealed that your account is overdrawn and you will be in trouble.

The metaphor is not perfect. In fact, every nation in the world is attempting to write checks beyond its means. But the US has managed to do by far a better job of it than any other nation. The checks we are not talking about are not just hoarded paper dollars (though there are billions of these stuffed in mattresses around the world) but dollar-denominated investments and securities, including T-bills, stocks, and mortgages. Currently the US is running a $700 billion per year trade deficit, this on top of trillions in government debt and trillions more in consumer debt. No other nation in the world comes remotely close to this level of bad-check writing, on either a total or a per-capita basis.

If a run on the US dollar were to occur, then the only financial solution would be to create even more dollars (presumably through government borrowing), which of course wouldn't actually solve the problem and would in the long run make matters worse. The currency would become almost worthless, and in the process real wealth (land, factories, and natural resources) would be confiscated and turned over to creditors.

What could cause this to happen? A decision by OPEC to openly sell oil for euros could be a trigger. Some oil is already quietly being sold for euros, and several countries including Iran and Saudi Arabia have floated the possibility of valuing oil against a basket of currencies (meaning, effectively, dollars and euros). The Arab OPEC states have also toyed with an idea that must be equally worrisome to Brussels and Washington: to sell oil for gold (the gold dinar). If and when this happens, the full wrath of America will descend upon the Arab Middle East - and that's why it hasn't happened yet."