Is the US dollar at risk of losing its position of international dominance? I’ve been seeing some breathless speculation to that effect over the past few weeks; I’ll talk about the sources of that speculation in a minute. But let me first note that this isn’t a new question. Indeed, I wrote about it at length a few years back.

And by a few years, I mean four decades. I published a paper titled The International Role of the Dollar: Theory and Prospect in 1984, in which I concluded that an end to dollar dominance was possible but not probable and that it wouldn’t make much difference even if it did happen.