The financial world has no better arbiter of whether the dollar’s days as the reserve currency are over than the International Monetary Fund.
In a new report, the IMF concludes we’re not quite there yet. But, it finds, the clock is ticking, perhaps faster than US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen might realize and that China’s currency is the key beneficiary of this historic pivot.
Most interesting, perhaps, is Barry Eichengreen co-authored the study, one surely being discussed at the highest levels of government. Eichengreen, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, is a top IMF adviser who made his name in financial circles during the 1997-98 Asian crisis.
His sense that the dollar is losing its place at the center of the economic solar system isn’t partisan or ideological. It’s based on empirical evidence.