The Dollar Reserve System as a Bastion of Empire and a Force of Economic Necrosis

The 1944 Bretton Woods agreement established the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the United States as the most economically powerful nation on earth. Its termination in 1971 gave the United States the “exorbitant privilege” of a fiat reserve currency. America’s export of fiat dollars supported decades of chronic current account deficits and debt-fueled overconsumption. Like the prototypical resource-rich nation, America suffers from a dollar-induced Dutch disease. An abundance of fiat dollars predisposed institutional failure: the economy increasingly advantaged few at the expense of many. Corporate activity reconfigured to transfer wealth from labor to capital, the proprietor of the dollar resource. Financialization undermined investment and production by capital reallocation from the real economy to the financial economy.Englis