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尼爾·弗格森：“逐漸地，然後突然地”，美元會這樣崩潰嗎？
尼爾 弗格森 美國斯坦福大學胡佛研究所高級研究員 2023-05-02 觀察者網
【文/尼爾·弗格森，譯/劉嘯雲】
“我每晚都要捫心自問，為什麽每個國家都必須以美元進行貿易？……為何在金本位製度之後是‘美元本位’，這是由誰決定的？……各國本可以用各自的貨幣結算進出口貿易，但現在所有國家都必須使用美元。”
4月13日，在位於上海的新開發銀行，巴西總統路易斯·伊納西奧·盧拉·達席爾瓦提出了上述問題，這一新聞引起了巴西民眾的廣泛關注。然而，在我看來，盧拉提出的問題根本稱不上“新”聞——無獨有偶，半個多世紀前，另一位總統這樣說道：
“美元作為一種國際貨幣，被賦予了超越性的價值……許多國家接收美元……以彌補美國國際收支的赤字，這使美國能夠無償地向他國借貸。美國人以美元償還外債，而美元是他們可以任意印製發行的……這種機製隻對美國單方有利……美元被廣泛視作公正的國際交易（媒介），但事實上，其隻是一種獨屬於美國的信貸手段。”
以上文字的作者是1965年2月4日的時任法國總統戴高樂。戴高樂激烈抨擊美元體係，其外長瓦列裏·吉斯卡爾·德斯坦（Valéry Giscard d'Estaing）提出了“過度特權”一詞，以表達法國對美元霸權的不滿。
戴高樂對美元的“過度特權”表示不滿（圖源：金融時報）
換言之，在財經新聞領域，對美元霸權的微詞早已是老生常談。穀歌數據顯示，“過度特權”一詞的使用頻率在2007年、2011年和2014年屢次達到峰值；“去美元化”等詞的使用頻率也有著類似的規律。
我首次涉及該話題是在20年前。2004年6月，我偶然為《新共和》雜誌撰稿，稿件主題為“歐洲貨幣一體化能否動搖美元的主導地位”。
當時，我對美元的未來並不樂觀：“對美國而言，最重要的問題在於：美元標準究竟能延續多久？隻要美元升值，美國就可以對巨額的貿易赤字和預算赤字聽之任之，無需擔憂其造成重大經濟影響；然而，一旦美國喪失了其作為世界儲備貨幣的地位且急劇貶值，後果將非常嚴重。不幸的是，美國收支的嚴重失衡，以及合適替代品（即歐元）的出現，使第二種情況的可能性與日俱增。”
所幸，我在寫下以上這段話時沒有賭咒發誓。
因此，當我再次聽聞唱衰美元的論調時，我的第一反應是質疑。但是，持這種觀點的不隻是盧拉，還包括一大批頗具聲望的經濟評論家。美國經濟研究所的彼得·C·厄爾（Peter C. Earle）表示：“長期來看，美元作為世界通用貨幣的使命已經結束了。”
厄爾認為，造成美元衰落的罪魁禍首是美政府對金融製裁的濫用。美國越傾向於將對手排除在美元支付體係之外，其他國家就越無法信任美元體係，從而致力於規避風險。近日，中國和巴西、中國和法國、印度和馬來西亞分別達成協議，在雙邊貿易中以彼此的貨幣進行結算。
近日，吉莉安·泰特（Gillian Tett）在英國《金融時報》上發表文章，呼籲大家“做好準備，麵對貨幣多極化的世界”。本月上旬，俄羅斯總統弗拉基米爾·普京向中國承諾，將以人民幣結算俄羅斯與亞非拉國家的貿易，從而減少“有毒的”美元資產。
英國對衝基金Eurizon SLJ Capital首席執行官斯蒂芬·詹（Stephen Jen）指出，上述趨勢使美元“遭受了驚人的崩潰”。羅賓·裏格爾斯沃思（Robin Wrigglesworth）在《金融時報》上詳細援引了斯蒂芬·詹的研究報告：“美國正喪失其作為儲備貨幣的地位，速度之快，頗為出人意料。究其原因，或許是由於俄烏衝突後，美國凍結了俄羅斯的外匯儲備，此舉構成了對他國財產權的威脅，從而引發了各國恐慌。2022年，我們見證了各國從‘世界警察’處撤資的時刻。”
此言非虛，但19年前歐元對美元的貶值也是如此。所以，我們需對數據進行更細致的分析。按照傳統標準，美國目前在國際儲備中所占份額（59%）確實小於1999年（逾70%）；然而，外交關係委員會成員布拉德·賽斯特（Brad Setser）指出，如果將統計圖的X軸向前延長至1995年，就會發現，美元目前在國際儲備中所占份額高於當年。
美元在國際儲備中所占比重曆年變化（圖源：彭博社）
無論如何，自上世紀90年代以來，世界貨幣市場已發生了一個重大變化：歐元在儲備貨幣、國際債務、國際貸款、外匯交易和全球支付等領域均成為了第二受歡迎的貨幣（如果我在2004年就預測到這一點，會顯得更為聰明，但這也會使此事顯得更加無趣而不值一提）；並在上述每一個領域（尤其是全球支付領域）推出了數字歐元。
歐元國家和美國一樣實施了對俄金融製裁，這大大削弱了“美國濫用金融製裁導致美元衰落”這一觀點的說服力。誠如賽斯特所言，即便考慮到主權財富基金對外匯的積累，俄烏衝突及由此導致的對俄金融製裁也並未對儲備貨幣的份額分配產生明顯影響。事實上，中國還增持了由美國聯邦住房管理局、政府國家抵押貸款協會等發行的所謂“美國政府機構債券”。
上周，Spectra Markets的布倫特·唐納利（Brent Donnelly）通過分析國際清算銀行的統計數據指出，相較於其他主流貨幣，美元依然享有特權，在全球交易中占據較多份額。自1989年至今，國際清算銀行每隔3年進行一次統計，在每一次統計中，美元都占據了全球交易份額的80%至90%，且並無下滑趨勢。
人民幣在國際儲備中所占份額仍然很小，原因很簡單——“資本管製”四個字足以說明一切。邁克爾·尼科萊托斯（Michael Nicoletos）辯稱，若無資本管製，大量資本將為了追求多元化和安全性而流出中國——早在十年前，英格蘭銀行就已在一篇論文中提出了類似觀點，但並未引起關注。在這一反事實條件下，人民幣將大幅貶值。
對此，前財政部長拉裏·薩默斯於2019年做出了精辟點評：“若想取代美元，就必須給出可行的替代品。當歐洲是博物館，日本是療養院，而比特幣尚且停留於實驗階段時，還有什麽貨幣比美元更適合作為儲備貨幣和貿易貨幣嗎？”
如果你（像我一樣）由衷喜歡美元及類似事物，或許也會讚同彭博社記者泰勒·考恩（Tyler Cowen）和約翰·亞瑟（John Authers）的觀點。前者認為，外國人就是喜歡那些雕刻凹印著美國國父頭像和共濟會古老符號的綠色紙片；後者則認為，“短中取長，美元仍是最合適的國際貨幣，因此‘去美元化’根本沒有發生。”
人們常說，我們生活在一個瞬息萬變的世界中。但是，半個世紀來，有一事從未改變——美元是占主導地位的貨幣（這令許多外國領導人深感不滿）。既然如此，為何經濟學家和金融記者每隔6-7年就要唱衰美元呢？
當然，縱觀曆史，確有很多事物多年不改，而後於旦夕之間麵目全非，正因如此，曆史才顯得難以預測。誠如海明威《太陽照常升起》中的一段對話：
比爾：“你是怎樣破產的？”
邁克：“逐漸地，然後突然地。”
然而，沒有任何依據表明，儲備貨幣也會以類似的方式走向衰落。從“英鎊主導”至“美元主導”的轉變是一個由1931年至今的漸進過程，間或伴隨著約十年一次的英鎊危機。盡管如此，時至今日，英鎊仍在全球儲備中占據了5%的份額。英鎊與美元的競爭是一場漫長的角逐。
因此，我們需要尋找蛛絲馬跡，以判斷當今世界是否正處於類似的漸進過程中。上世紀90年代，歐元創立，隨後在儲備貨幣競賽中贏得亞軍；而今，種種跡象表明，人民幣正在積蓄力量，預備於2043年超越日元和英鎊，在新一輪儲備貨幣競賽中躋身前三。
伯克利經濟史學家巴利·艾森格林等人近日發表論文，稱“人民幣可通過非常規途徑，獲得儲備貨幣地位”。他們認為，中國無需全麵實行金融自由化（包括開放資本賬戶），即可使人民幣成為國際貨幣。
其一，央行貨幣互換協議激增，使各國“有信心從中國央行處獲得人民幣”。其二，離岸人民幣市場擴大，“使央行儲備經理和其他投資者相信人民幣兌美元的匯率是穩定而可預測的”。
在上述兩個方麵，中國均取得了令人矚目的進展。2009年至今，中國央行（即中國人民銀行）已與至少39家央行達成雙邊貨幣互換協議，總額高達3.7萬億元人民幣（約合5500億美元）。自2010年香港首次獲準人民幣交易以來，離岸市場在全球24個城市如雨後春筍般湧現。至2021 年7月，離岸人民幣存款已達1.25萬億（約合2000億美元），仍然難望美元項背，但已小有所成。
同時，正如霍恩（Horn）等人所言，中國已成為國際上的最終貸款人，“構建了一種新型全球體係，向深陷債務困境的國家提供跨境救援貸款。”
近年來，中國已為20餘個國家提供了超1700億美元的流動性支持，包括對即將到期的互換反複延期。中國國有銀行和企業額外發放了700億美元的救助貸款，用於支持國際收支。中國的救助總計相當於過去十年國際貨幣基金組織貸款總額的20%以上。
霍恩等人將之概述為“一帶一路救助”。他們指出，得到救助資金的國家往往是“一帶一路”倡議的成員。相較於西方國家提供的類似貸款，中國的貸款包含更高的利息。
凡是嚴肅的曆史研究，無不致力於識別典型範式。以上兩篇論文的作者都在曆史中發現了相似的範式。“今天的人民幣，正如上世紀50-60年代的美元”，艾森格林等人表示，“如今人民幣-美元的自由兌換受限於資本賬戶管製，正如當年美元-黃金的自由兌換受限於布雷頓森林體係下的美國貨幣法。在布雷頓森林體係維係的數十年間，美元與黃金掛鉤，但不可在美國境內兌換為金屬。國際貨幣（當年的美元和今天的人民幣）難以完全兌換為最終儲備資產（當年的黃金和今天的美元），這一現象催生了當年倫敦的離岸黃金市場和今天的離岸人民幣市場”。
霍恩等人還指出，“今天的局勢，與當年美國開始崛起為全球金融大國的時代（尤其是20世紀30年代及二戰之後）頗為相似。當時，美國通過進出口銀行、外匯穩定基金和美聯儲，向對美國銀行和出口商負有巨額債務的國家提供紓困基金。這些臨時行為隨著時間推移而發展為一種久經考驗的全球危機管理體係。中國可能也會走上類似的道路。”
這些論文使我意識到，早在上世紀80-90年代之前，美國就已經占據了全球主導地位。其表現之一就是，美國成為了國際上的最終貸款人。
美元之所以能逐漸取代英鎊，也是因為美國擁有更為先進的金融技術。今天的中國取得了類似的優勢：中國在線支付平台的規模一騎絕塵，遙遙領先於西方。正如斯坦福大學的達雷爾·達菲（Darrell Duffie）所言，中國最值得關注的並非備受吹噓的央行數字貨幣（e-CNY），而是支付寶——其交易量較前者多出三個數量級，且已擁有龐大的國際業務，包括220萬美國用戶。
同時，今天美國政府的赤字遠超20年前，且美聯儲一直致力於將其貨幣化。2004年，美聯儲的資產負債僅占美國GDP的6%；而今，曆經數輪量化寬鬆等幹預措施，這一比例飆升至35%。2021-2023年美國通脹率的激增，在很大程度上應歸咎於財政和貨幣政策的重大失誤。如果美國有意於維持其在全球貨幣市場中的主導地位的話，我隻能說美國將自己的意圖掩蓋得很好。
上述因素導致美元黃金價格在近五年間飆升50%以上，而美國國債卻下跌了8%。約翰·梅納德·凱恩斯曾對金本位製做出著名的批評，稱其為“野蠻的遺跡”，但是，無息資產的表現優於有息資產並非野蠻的象征。根據世界黃金協會的最新數據，在世界官方持有的黃金中，30%屬於歐元區，23%屬於美國，而中俄合計僅占12%。
但是，2002-2023年間，黃金的最大買主是俄羅斯（1876公噸）和中國（1525噸），土耳其、印度和哈薩克斯坦落於其後。同期最大賣家則是歐元區（1726噸）和瑞士（1158噸），英語國家則僅僅出售了87噸。
【本文譯自《每月評論》（Monthly Review）】
The Dollar's Demise May Come Gradually, But Not Suddenly
Rumors of the death of the US currency are as exaggerated as they are frequently repeated.
The president in question was Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and the venue was the New Development Bank in Shanghai on April 13. There was a great deal of interest in this latest news about Lula when I visited Sao Paulo last week. To me, however, the striking thing was how un-new it was. Lula’s words immediately brought to my mind the musings of another president more than half a century ago:
The convention whereby the dollar is given a transcendent value as an international currency no longer rests on its initial base. … The fact that many states accept dollars … in order to make up for the deficits of [the] American balance of payments, has enabled the United States to be indebted to foreign countries free of charge. Indeed, what they owe those countries, they pay … in dollars that they themselves can issue as they wish. … This unilateral facility attributed to America has helped spread the idea that the dollar is an impartial, international [means] of exchange, whereas it is a means of credit appropriated to one state.
The speaker then was President Charles de Gaulle of France, and the date was Feb. 4, 1965. It was de Gaulle’s broadside against the dollar that prompted his finance minister, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, to coin the memorable phrase “exorbitant privilege,” which encapsulated the French complaint.
Being fed up with the dominance of the mighty dollar is, in other words, old hat. Indeed, it is such a recurrent theme of financial journalism that one can identify cycles in the use of the phrase “exorbitant privilege.” Recent peaks, according to Google, were in 2007, 2011 and 2014. The Google “Ngram” for “de-dollarization” follows a similar path.
first wrote an article on the subject nearly two decades ago, in June 2004. I was then an occasional contributor to The New Republic and my theme was the grave challenge to dollar dominance posed by the creation of a single European currency.
“For the United States,” I wrote portentously, “the question is: How long can [the] dollar standard last? As long as the dollar is ascendant, the United States can continue to run huge trade deficits and budget deficits, without having to worry about serious economic fallout. But if the dollar were to lose its status as the world’s reserve currency, and suffer a more precipitous slide, that could have grave consequences. Unfortunately for Americans, the sheer magnitude of the imbalances, along with the emergence of suitable alternative — the Euro — have made this a distinct possibility.”
Fortunately for me, a man is not under oath when writing such stuff.
Readers will therefore understand why my initial response is one of skepticism to any new claims that the demise of the dollar is imminent. But here they come again — not just Lula but a cluster of widely respected economic commentators. According to Peter C. Earle of the American Institute for Economic Research, “the dollar’s fate as the lingua franca of world commerce over the long haul may already be sealed.”
For Earle, it is American overuse of financial sanctions that is to blame. The more the US exploits its power to shut adversaries’ economies out of the dollar payments system, the more other countries want to reduce their exposure to that risk. Hence recent agreements between China and Brazil, China and France, and India and Malaysia, to settle trades in one another’s currencies.
“Prepare for a multipolar currency world” was Gillian Tett’s message in a recent Financial Times piece. Earlier this month, while Chinese president Xi Jinping was in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged to adopt the renminbi for “payments between Russia and countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America” to reduce Russian exposure to “toxic” dollar-denominated assets.
Because of such trends, according to Stephen Jen of Eurizon SLJ Capital, the dollar has already “suffered a stunning collapse.” “The USD is losing its market share as a reserve currency at a much faster rate than is commonly believed,” Jen wrote in a recent research note quoted at length by Robin Wrigglesworth in the FT. “The main driver of the collapse in USD’s reserve status in 2022 may have reflected a panicked reaction to property rights being jeopardized” by the freezing of Russia’s foreign currency reserves following its invasion of Ukraine. “What we witnessed in 2022 was sort of a ‘defund-the-global-police’ moment.”
That’s a nice line, but so was the eurotrashing of the dollar 19 years ago. So, let’s take a closer look at the data. It’s true that, conventionally measured, the dollar now accounts for a smaller share of international reserves than it did in 1999 — down from just above 70% then to 59%. However, as Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations has pointed out, if you take the X-axis back to 1995, you can see that the dollar share of international reserves is higher today than it was back then.
The Dominant Dollar
Global foreign exchange reserves
In any case, the principal shift that has occurred since the 1990s is that the euro has become the world’s second-favorite reserve currency (which would have been a smarter but more boring and therefore less publishable thing for me to have predicted in 2004). The same goes for international debt issuance, international loans, foreign exchange turnover and global payments through Swift: In each domain (especially the last) the euro has clearly established itself as numero dos.
The fact that the euro area countries joined the US in imposing financial sanctions on Russia greatly weakens the argument that it is American overuse of sanctions that is undermining dollar dominance. As Setser notes, the invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions don’t seem to have had a discernible effect on reserve allocation, even when you take into account the various sovereign wealth funds, which also accumulate foreign currency assets. The Chinese have actually increased their holdings of so-called “agency” bonds issued by US government entities such as the Federal Housing Administration and the Government National Mortgage Association.
The clinching data point was provided last week by Brent Donnelly of Spectra Markets, who used Bank for International Settlements statistics to show that, when it comes to major currencies’ shares of global transactions, the dollar’s privilege is still exorbitant. Every three years since 1989, the BIS has put the dollar’s share at between 80% and 90%. There has been no downward trend.
It is not hard to explain why the Chinese renminbi remains such a small share of international reserves: “capital controls” are the only two words you need to say to end the discussion. As Michael Nicoletos recently argued, without capital controls, a very large amount of Chinese capital would leave the country in search of diversification and more secure property rights. The Bank of England made this point in a seldom-cited but excellent paper a decade ago. The counterfactual of a convertible renminbi is one of a significantly depreciated currency.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers had a good line about all this back in 2019. “You cannot replace something with nothing,” he said. What other currency is preferable to the dollar as a reserve and trade currency “when Europe’s a museum, Japan’s a nursing home, China’s a jail, and Bitcoin’s an experiment”?
If you are structurally long the dollar (as I am) and like that sort of thing (as I do), I can also recommend reassuring takes from my Bloomberg Opinion colleagues Tyler Cowen and John Authers. Foreigners just love our green-colored pieces of cloth with their rugged founders’ faces and their quaint masonic iconography, argues the former. “De-dollarization isn’t happening at all,” says the latter, because “the dollar is the cleanest dirty shirt.”
It is a cliché to say that we live in an ever-changing world. But if something doesn’t change for half a century — the dollar is the dominant currency and some foreign leaders resent that — why do economists and financial journalists keep predicting the demise of the dollar every six or seven years?
Of course, there are many things in history that stayed the same for 50 years and then suddenly changed. That is precisely what makes history hard to predict. It’s why people love to quote the exchange from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
But there is no basis for thinking that reserve currencies lose their status in anything resembling these ways. The transition from sterling dominance to dollar dominance was all gradual, even if it was punctuated by occasional sterling crises. Those happened roughly once a decade from 1931 until, well, last year. And despite all the crises, sterling still accounts for about 5% of global reserves. This is a tortoise race.
So what we need to look for are signs that another such gradual change could be getting underway. Just as the creation of the euro in the 1990s paved the way for a new silver medalist in the reserve-currency race, so — if you look closely — there are meaningful signs that the Chinese currency is gathering enough momentum to be a meaningful contender for bronze in, say, 2043, passing the yen and the pound.
In an important new paper, the Berkeley economic historian Barry Eichengreen and co-authors have called it “the renminbi’s unconventional route to reserve currency status.” Their argument is that China does not need full financial liberalization, including an open capital account, to increase the international use of its currency.
First, the rapid growth of central bank swap lines engenders “confidence that RMB can be obtained from the Chinese central bank.” Second, the proliferation of offshore renminbi markets “reassures central bank reserve managers and other investors that they can convert RMB into dollars at stable and predictable rates.”
The scale of both these developments is startling. Since around 2009, the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, has negotiated bilateral currency swap agreements totaling 3.7 trillion renminbi ($550 billion) with at least 39 central banks. Since 2010, when renminbi trading in Hong Kong was first authorized, offshore markets have sprung up in 24 other cities around the world. By July 2021, 1.25 trillion renminbi ($200 billion) was deposited in offshore accounts — an order of magnitude smaller than offshore dollar deposits, but not nothing.
At the same time, as another excellent new paper by Horn et al. shows, China has established itself as an international lender of last resort, launching “a new global system for cross-border rescue lending to countries in debt distress.”
In recent years, more than $170 billion in liquidity support has been extended to more than 20 countries, including repeated rollovers of swaps coming due. Chinese state-owned banks and enterprises have given out an additional $70 billion in rescue loans for balance-of-payments support. All told, China’s bailouts are equivalent to more than 20% of total International Monetary Fund lending over the past decade.
The authors sum their story up as “Bailouts on the Belt and Road,” noting that recipients of funds tend to be Belt and Road Initiative borrowers and that the interest rates they pay are relatively high compared with Western loans to countries in similar circumstances.
The serious study of history is all about pattern recognition. Both sets of authors spot the same pattern. “The RMB today,” write Eichengreen et al., “is not unlike the dollar in the 1950s and 1960s. Convertibility of RMB into dollars today is limited by capital account restrictions, while convertibility of dollars into gold was restricted by US monetary law under Bretton Woods. The 1950s and 1960s were the decades of the Bretton Woods System, when the dollar had to be backed by gold but was not convertible into the metal in the US. The offshore gold market in London then and the offshore RMB market today are products of a similar phenomenon, namely the imperfect convertibility of an international currency (the dollar then, the RMB now) into the ultimate reserve asset (gold then, the dollar now).”
Horn et al. also see “historical parallels to the era when the US started its rise as a global financial power, especially in the 1930s and after World War 2, when it used the US Ex-Im Bank, the US Exchange Stabilization Fund and the Fed to provide rescue funds to countries with large liabilities to US banks and exporters. Over time, these ad hoc activities by the US developed into a tested system of global crisis management, a path that China may possibly pursue as well.”
It had not fully struck me until I read these papers that the US dollar rose to global dominance before financial liberalization, which happened in the 1980s and 1990s. And part of its rise took the form of acting as an international lender of last resort.
Another reason the dollar slowly displaced sterling was that American financial technology raced ahead of British. Something similar is also happening today: China has pioneered online payment platforms on a far larger scale than anything we have in the West. As my Stanford colleague Darrell Duffie points out, China’s much-vaunted central bank digital currency (e-CNY) is not the thing to watch. It’s still Alipay, which handles three orders of magnitude more transactions than e-CNY and already has a large international presence, including 2.2 million users in the US.
Meanwhile, the US government is running significantly higher deficits than the ones I wrote about in 2004. And, unlike two decades ago, the Federal Reserve has been monetizing a large part of the deficits. Back then, the Fed balance sheet was 6% of GDP. Now, after successive rounds of quantitative easing and other interventions, it is up to 35%. The 2021-23 surge of US inflation cannot be explained without reference to major errors of fiscal and monetary policy. If the US intends to preserve its global monetary dominance, it is concealing that intention very well.
One striking consequence of these developments has been a significant surge in the dollar price of gold, which has risen more than 50% in the past five years, at a time when US Treasuries have fallen by 8%. John Maynard Keynes famously called the gold standard a “barbarous relic,” but there is nothing barbarous about a non-interest-bearing asset that outperforms an interest-bearing one. Data from the World Gold Council are revealing on this score. According to the most recent figures, the euro area holds 30% of total world official gold holdings, the US 23%, whereas Russia and China together hold just 12%.
However, the top buyers of gold between 2002 and 2023 were Russia (1,876 metric tons) and China (1,525 tons), with Turkey, India and Kazakhstan some way behind. The top sellers over the same period were the euro area (minus 1,726 tons) and Switzerland (minus 1,158 tons), with the English-speaking countries (minus 87 tons) far behind.
All That Glitters
Additions to gold reserves in metric tons
Source: World Gold Council
Yet this is not to suggest that gold is another, more ancient rival to the dollar. It is far from clear that accumulating gold will solve the Russian — and Chinese — problem of vulnerability to US sanctions. It is just a good illustration of how slowly the global monetary system changes.
The year before de Gaulle’s diatribe against the dollar was when my favorite James Bond film was released. Goldfinger remains a wonderful cinematic achievement, from the villain’s first victim — the actress Shirley Eaton, clad only in gold paint — to the exquisite exchange between Bond and Gert Frobe as a laser beam inches towards Sean Connery’s groin:
007: Do you expect me to talk?
Goldfinger: No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!
But, aside from the almost unmitigated sexism, one aspect of Goldfinger has dated absurdly. It’s the moment when the man from the Bank of England explains why Goldfinger’s suspicious accumulation of gold is a problem requiring 007’s attention:
We here at the Bank of England are the official depository for gold bullion. Just as Fort Knox, Kentucky, is for the United States. We know the amounts we each hold and the amounts deposited in other banks. We can estimate what is being held for industrial purposes. Thus, both governments can establish the true value of the dollar and the pound.
Those days were over within seven years, when President Richard Nixon broke the link between gold and the dollar that had been the anchor of the Bretton Woods System. Since then, the currencies of the world have fluctuated against one another and against gold, sometimes quite violently, sometimes barely noticeably.
Hardly a Currency Crisis
Source: Bank for International Settlements
Just look at the trade-weighted real effective exchange rate of the dollar since the “Nixon shock.” There’s a 32% plunge from July 1971 to October 1978. Then there’s a 49% rally to March 1985. Another 36% plunge to August 1992. Then up 33% to February 2002. Back down 26% to July 2011. And all the way up 53% to October 2022.
You can say what you like about the dollar, but it sure is bouncy. And it is precisely this lack of rigidity that explains the persistence of the post-1971 monetary system. Unlike the gold standard, the dollar system has an elastic anchor — a fiat dollar, the supply of which is primarily determined by domestic economic considerations.
Other currencies are very welcome to compete: the euro, the renminbi — and (who knows?) maybe the future “BRICS currency” imagined by Lula in Shanghai. But do not expect “de-dollarization” to follow the Hemingway two-stage model. The world changes its monetary anchor only one way. Gradually.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
- The World Will Welcome the Dollar’s Coming Slide: Marcus Ashworth
- What De-Dollarization? The Dollar Rules the World: Tyler Cowen
- The Dollar Will Vanquish Pretenders to Its Throne: Marcus Ashworth
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— With assistance by Elaine He
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Niall Ferguson at nferguson23@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net
