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The U.S. gets perks from the dollar’s lofty statusin international trade, starting with the ability toborrow more cheaply. So the dollar has long facedwannabe competitors. The euro was created partlyto chip away at its dominance, and China has beenpushing for the yuan to be used more widely.Neither currency has dislodged the greenback fromits perch. According to data going back to 1989, thedollar hasn’t lost any of its share in central banks’foreign currency reserves, in currency trading, orin the cross-border liabilities of banks. Its share ofdebt issued in foreign currency has grown.
Yet challenges keep coming. There’s digital currency,such as Facebook Inc.’s planned Libra, andPresident Donald Trump’s trade wars and isolationistpolicies, which have given other countries anextra nudge to seek alternatives. Europe is attemptingto circumvent U.S. sanctions against Iran byestablishing an alternative payment system thatwouldn’t depend on dollars.
But currency watchers and economists saypotential substitutes for the dollar all present biggerproblems than the status quo. “The dollar doesn’t have to be great, it just has to be theleast worst one,” says Paul Sheard, a senior fellowat Harvard and former chief economist of S&PGlobal. “China is still a communist country transitioningslowly. Europeans point out themselvesthat the monetary union is still a work in progress.It will take decades for either to get to a point tobe real alternatives.”
Because of U.S. sanctions, Russian and Iraniancentral banks have partially moved away fromthe dollar in their holdings. Yet that’s done verylittle to tip the scales, especially as much of thediversification has come in the form of risinggold reserves. Europe’s special financial channelfor trade with Iran is so far only for food andmedicine—which U.S. sanctions already allow—andhas failed to persuade Iran to stick to the nuclearagreement it struck in 2015.
Facebook, which counts almost a third of theworld population as users, is a formidable forcethat has upended many legacy systems. Yet Libraat this stage sounds more like an alternative paymentsystem than a new currency. Visa Inc. andMastercard Inc. are among the project’s initialbackers. And the value of the Libra coin will bebased on a basket of traditional currencies. “Youneed state backing for any legitimate currency,”says Philip Suttle, a former Bank of England economistwho now runs his own advisory firm. Statesare unlikely to let Libra become a freewheelingglobal medium of exchange, especially if it jeopardizesanti-money-laundering efforts. And Visaand Mastercard’s backing won’t last if the projectruns into regulatory hurdles, according to MorganStanley analyst James Faucette.
Facebook executives faced skeptical U.S. lawmakersduring hearings in mid-July. SherrodBrown, a Democratic senator from Ohio, called theproject “delusional,” adding: “Look at Facebook’srecord. We would be crazy to give them a chance toexperiment with people’s bank accounts.”
As for the euro and the yen, holding them haslimited appeal now because bond yields and interestrates in the euro zone and Japan are so low—insome cases negative. And there’s an added problemin Europe: “There’s no central euro bond, makingthe continent’s bond market fragmented withlots of different issuers, more like the U.S. municipaldebt market,” says Marc Chandler, chief marketstrategist at Bannockburn Global Forex.
The yuan is a relatively new challenger asChina’s economy has grown rapidly to becomethe second- largest in the world. Its share inreserves, global transactions, and currency tradinghas been growing fast, albeit from a very lowbase. The International Monetary Fund didn’teven break out the yuan’s share in global foreignexchange reserves, including it in “other currencies”until 2016.
A big hurdle for the yuan is that China’s policymakersmanage its value, which makes marketplayers wary of it. “The yuan will definitely playa bigger role, but how much depends on howfast they’ll liberalize their currency,” says FredBergsten, the founding director of the PetersonInstitute for International Economics.
Given all that, the biggest threats to the dollarwould have to come from the U.S. itself. Policiesthat could lead to high inflation might erode confidencein the currency, according to former BoEeconomist Suttle. That could happen if Trumpreplaced the Fed chairman and packed the centralbank with governors who’d follow his orders inhis second term—or if the same happened undera populist Democratic president. “Fiscal expansionfinanced by the Fed could crash the dollar,”says Suttle.
But Congress would have to go along with boththe Fed appointments and the budgetary expansion.The more likely scenario, Bergsten says, isfor the euro and yuan to become more importantin the next few decades, leading to a multipolarcurrency regime. Even so, the dollar will probablyremain in first place. “If the U.S. screws up massively,Europeans and Chinese do the right things,with all three happening together, the dollar couldlose its top spot,” Bergsten says. “That’s not an easycombination to get to.” —Yalman Onaran
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