Word: dollarization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...There have been other recent hassles with dollar-based trade. When U.S. financial institutions like AIG and Lehman Brothers began to disintegrate in 2008, global money markets were so roiled it became expensive for any trade to be done at all in dollars. "What precipitated [China's swap agreements] was the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the worries over trade financing at that time," says Johanna Chua, a regional economist with Citigroup in Hong Kong. "If the dollar is extremely volatile it costs more to hedge...
...what is the point of China issuing all these swaps? "This is a contingency plan in case the dollar implodes," says Fox-Pitt Kelton's Matthews. "It is a way of continuing trade with its major trading partners." Other analysts say China is trying to assert itself, through words rather than deeds, on the global economic stage by taking a step toward making the yuan a global currency. "A lot of this is symbolic," says Citigroup's Chua. "China wants to be a player." And one sure way to be a player, as everyone knows, is to threaten to quit...
...unexpected lesson in the power of the U.S. dollar during a visit to Tashkent, the dreary capital of Uzbekistan, several years back. While heading into town from the airport, my babbling taxi driver kept one hand (barely) on the steering wheel while his other shoved a stack of local currency, the som, into my face. He insistently urged me to trade the money for dollars. After checking in at the grim Hotel Uzbekistan, a nattily clad porter showed me and my wife to a room, fiddled with a broken TV set, and then reached into his jacket pockets for large...
...been throughout the world, from North Korean souvenir shops to Ethiopian bazaars, for the past six decades. Government officials measure the health of national economies by how many dollars are stashed away in their central-bank vaults. The international prices of everything from crude oil to cocoa beans are denominated in dollars. The dollar is a universal medium of exchange because it is liquid, readily available and backed by the largest economy in the world. There has been little reason for global commerce to function any other way. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...Until now. As the world reels from the worst recession since the 1930s - a recession triggered by faulty U.S. economic stewardship - a vociferous chorus of critics is calling for a coup to topple King Dollar. In late March, Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of China's central bank, said the global economy would be better off with a "supersovereign" reserve currency, in place of one issued by a specific nation - in other words, the dollar. "The frequency and increasing intensity of financial crises," Zhou said, "suggests the costs of such a system to the world may have exceeded its benefits." Zhou...