The dollar didn’t become “reserve” because it was virtuous. It became reserve because it was weaponized, with aircraft carriers, monopolizing control over SWIFT, sanctions lawfare, IMF shock therapy, and the quiet threat that if you don’t price energy in USD, you’ll be “liberated.”
https://x.com/IslanderWORLD/status/2007280360388768178
The dollar didn’t become “reserve” because it was virtuous. It became reserve because it was weaponized, with aircraft carriers, monopolizing control over SWIFT, sanctions lawfare, IMF shock therapy, and the quiet threat that if you don’t price energy in USD, you’ll be “liberated.”
That model has an expiry date, and Washington lit the fuse itself: freezing reserves, seizing assets, turning payment rails into a kill-switch. Once you prove money is political, everyone who can will build an exit. Not because they love alternatives, but because they fear becoming the next headline.
Watch the metals, the signal no one can hide, because they don’t speak ideology, they speak settlement. Gold and silver aren’t so much at all time highs, they have hit yes, but more importantly, they're stress tests on a system where paper claims outnumber deliverable reality by orders of magnitude. When prices surge through suppression, it’s not speculation escaping the cage, it’s sovereign actors quietly converting promises into atoms. China and Russia aren’t chasing yield, they’re building ballast. Gold for reserves, silver for industry and monetary optionality, bilateral settlements in national currencies, backed by hard assets, that clears without touching the dollar’s tripwires. This is what de-risking looks like when you don’t trust the referee. Just look at who owns the metals that matter.
Put it together and the picture sharpens: weaponized finance forced the world to rediscover money as a political liability unless it’s nobody’s liability at all. Metals anchor trade outside sanction reach; energy flows reprice outside USD lanes; settlement migrates from paper abstractions to physical reality. The result is not the dollar dying overnight, it’s the floor disappearing beneath it. When marginal demand for Treasuries fades, when metals drain from paper vaults, when trade clears outside of Washington and London's orbit, the Ponzi loses its gravity. And gravity always wins.
The endgame is simple and brutal... the US has been living off “exorbitant privilege”—importing real goods and exporting paper claims, while piling up obligations that only work if the world keeps accepting IOUs as savings. Strip away the reserve halo and you collide with the math... north of $200T in unfunded liabilities, a debt structure that assumes permanently cheap financing, and an economy financialized into a tollbooth for rent-seekers. When demand for the paper thins, the choices get ugly fast austerity, inflation, capital controls, or some hybrid of all three.
And here’s the part the TV priests won’t say: the empire’s foreign policy was the business model. Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, each was a lesson broadcast in fire: “disobey and we will break you.” Ukraine became the most expensive billboard yet. But the hidden cost is blowback.. every regime-change adventure taught the Global South the same survival rule, do not keep your national oxygen in Washington’s hands.
So yes, when the dollar’s dominance cracks, it won’t be a neat academic rebalancing. It will be a domestic reckoning: a country that outsourced industry, monetized everything, and mistook sanction power for productivity will discover what happens when tribute slows. The Ponzi doesn’t end with a polite memo. It ends with panic, then rage, because an empire that can’t print obedience has to finally pay for itself.
And that is catastrophic.
posted by Satish Sharma at
10:42
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