Illuminating article. And if the yuan bonds information is real, it won't even take 4 years for a lot of global finance to move away from the dollar.
It might be tough for the US to accept the higher cost of global resources (and thus become a poorer country) but maybe this gradual decline in dollars status is what the administration hopes is the best case.
World reserve currency status follows the leader in manufacturing and trade. Maintaining dollar hegemony was never going to be feasible after de-industrialization, but short-sighted decisions like weaponizing SWIFT have accelerated its decline. As the dollar is gradually shunted out of world trade, the US will be less able to export its inflation abroad. The implications won’t be pretty.
So is China going to finally let the Yuan fully float and get rid of exchange controls? That's when you know the yuan has really come of age...when you don't need special documentation to convert your yuan into dollars or euros.
But something really needs to replace the petro dollar, especially as chinese EV and clean energy tech production reduces or eliminates the need for having a petro dollar at all in most of the world.
People wank about "stability and convertibility" for reserve currency, but the real story is USD strong because USD profitable. US can internationalize domestic crisis, blow up countries, stir foreign instability "paradoxically" global investors pile into the dollar safe haven. The foundation of that is investors trust FED will ensure USD more profitable on stabilized basis than alternatives, regardless of problems, foreign or domestic, and overtime this accumulates into uncontestably deep liquidity that sustains reserve currency. But that's also mechanism of baseline Triffin bind: the U.S. runs deficits to supply dollars abroad to maintain reserve status, if Trump (because that's what he's signalling) deliberately abandons USD ROI credibility and sustains it, like weak-dollar policy (for muh exports, how how investors lose 30c on the dollar), reserve demand unravels or debt servicing increases even more. AKA USD can survive almost any external crises, but internal sabotage i.e. sustained deliberate devaluation will erode profitability (safety) / liquidity premium -> feedback loop of weaker demand, higher yields, both bad. Reserve demand only works when the FED isn't captured for policy that undermines USD premium / mercantilist FX gaming and US eats Triffin that may or may not be good for Americans.
At end of the day PRC doesn't want RMB as reserve - they don't want Triffin either. They just want insulation from USD weaponization while the U.S. is sanction-happy and forced into erratic policy trying to "solve" its structural bind by making foreigners eat the cost. The real Chinese play is to build RMB strength at home while the U.S. either burns the dollar to dig out of the debt hole, imposing losses on global investors, or keeps digging until debt service alone paralyzes U.S. policy capacity, already visible in constraints on defense procurement, i.e. airforce / naval capitalization. That paralysis is the bigger strategic win than simply ending USD reserve status.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 22.9 ms ] threadIt might be tough for the US to accept the higher cost of global resources (and thus become a poorer country) but maybe this gradual decline in dollars status is what the administration hopes is the best case.
But something really needs to replace the petro dollar, especially as chinese EV and clean energy tech production reduces or eliminates the need for having a petro dollar at all in most of the world.
At end of the day PRC doesn't want RMB as reserve - they don't want Triffin either. They just want insulation from USD weaponization while the U.S. is sanction-happy and forced into erratic policy trying to "solve" its structural bind by making foreigners eat the cost. The real Chinese play is to build RMB strength at home while the U.S. either burns the dollar to dig out of the debt hole, imposing losses on global investors, or keeps digging until debt service alone paralyzes U.S. policy capacity, already visible in constraints on defense procurement, i.e. airforce / naval capitalization. That paralysis is the bigger strategic win than simply ending USD reserve status.
We seem to be at the middle stage for US and China, the former going down, the latter up. Top world currency change will come sometime.