• JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    The world does not trade in US dollars, thats a myth. If a Japanese company buys something in Australia, they convert from yen to AUD, they don’t go through the USD. Thats not what “reserve currency” means.

    There used to be a thing called the Gold Standard. The amount of gold you had in reserve was linked to the amount of money you could print. The gold standard failed because it was too restrictive.

    After WW2, the US proposed that instead of a lump of metal, money creation would be tied to the national economy. The US economy would be the “gold reserve” of the world and all the other currencies woudl be compared to it. The goal was to reduce the amount of foreigners using USD, as this was causing American notes to leak overseas and made inflation difficult to determine.

    The Euro is used over a range of economies that are only loosely tied together. Although crude monetary policy like interest rates are common, tax collection is up to individual countries, so the Euro is not a stable value as there are too many variables.