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@ Setor
2025-04-24 17:47:03
**Dollar Hegemony, America’s Economic Demise – and *The Mandibles***
Gambling with the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency is little short of economic suicide. The tale in which the currency *bancor* becomes the new global money gives us a hint of how that might unfold.
The editorial team at *Dagens Næringsliv*, like so many others, searches in vain for logic in President Donald Trump’s economic policies. In many cases the aims and the means exclude one another. Most dangerous of all is the game of playing with fire: putting the dollar’s reserve-currency role at risk is tantamount to economic self-destruction.
Anyone wondering what that could look like should read Lionel Shriver’s novel *The Mandibles – A Family, 2029-2047*. In it she portrays a near-future United States where, almost overnight, the dollar loses both status and value and the *bancor* becomes the world’s new currency.
*Bancor* is the name John Maynard Keynes proposed for a supranational reserve currency at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944.
Naturally it is China, leading the BRICS nations, that controls the *bancor*—by then it has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest economy.
The book appeared in 2014, before Trump was on the political radar, and neither Trump nor MAGA is central to the plot. Yet with each passing day and every new U.S. economic initiative, the novel seems more prophetic. It is decidedly dystopian and reminds us that, although dollar hegemony has its downsides, abolishing it is not something we should wish for.
Global finance rests on U.S. government debt—and on the absence of doubt that America will honor that debt. Even the slightest doubt could trigger an economic catastrophe.
It is no secret that China and the BRICS countries are already working to avoid trading in dollars. That alone will weaken the dollar over time, whatever Trump does. The Trump administration hardly needs to accelerate the trend with peculiar policies.
Ironically, cryptocurrency may prove the dollar’s salvation. Not bitcoin, but *stablecoins*—cryptocurrencies designed to keep a fixed 1-to-1 peg to the U.S. dollar. The stablecoin *Tether*, issued by the company of the same name, is by far the largest of its kind, with tokens in circulation worth more than NOK 1.5 trillion. According to its own figures, Tether has over 400 million users, most of them in the Global South (Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America).
Tether is now one of the biggest buyers of U.S. Treasury bonds—by its own account likely the third-largest in 2024—and ranks among the world’s most profitable firms, earning about NOK 20 billion last year with fewer than 100 employees.
The business model is as simple as it is effective: the interest spread between the bonds and the zero-interest tether token. All the coupon income effectively becomes profit. By building the dollar’s digital infrastructure outside the United States, Tether is helping secure the future of dollar hegemony.
https://www.dn.no/innlegg/valuta/dollar/kryptovaluta/dollarhegemoniet-usas-okonomiske-undergang-og-the-mandibles/2-1-1804337