Why the world's reserve currency is a trap

Economist Robert Triffin warned in 1960 that a country whose currency serves as the world's reserve must run deficits to supply enough of it for global trade — but those same deficits erode confidence in the currency's long-term value. His prediction bore out in 1971, when the US ended dollar-gold convertibility and collapsed the Bretton Woods system.

— Robert Triffin, Gold and the Dollar Crisis: The Future of Convertibility — Yale University Press, 1960
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