Is the reign of the dollar over?

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For decades, dollars have been the world's common financial language. Central banks everywhere hold dollars as a way to safely store their wealth. Countries, businesses, and people use it to trade; around 90% of all foreign exchange transactions involve dollars. It's the world's money, the world's "reserve currency."

But what if that is changing? What if the world stops seeing the dollar as safe?

Today on the show, what is a "reserve currency"? Why is it the dollar? And if the dollar falls from favor, what will replace it?

This episode of Planet Money was produced by Emma Peaslee with help from James Sneed. It was edited by Marianne McCune with fact checking help from Sierra Juarez. It was engineered by Kwesi Lee. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

The Dollar Trap by Eswar Prasad
Exorbitant Privilege by Barry Eichengreen
Our Dollar. Your Problem by Ken Rogoff

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Transcript

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0:51.7	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:56.7	Mike Kudzel, a money manager at Pimco, got to work on Tuesday, April 8th, ready for a crazy day.
1:03.9	Not wearing a suit that day, dress for your day, wearing Kevlar.
1:08.2	Kevlar like what firefighters wear, because markets were in flames in the aftermath of President
1:13.9	Trump's big tariff announcements.
1:16.2	So Mike is looking at his screens, and they are all red.
1:19.3	Basically every market in the United States, all lines are going down.
1:23.5	You had equities go down meaningfully.
1:25.8	You had bonds go down in price meaningfully.
1:29.7	And you had the U.S. dollar that went lower.
1:32.9	And that is weird.
1:34.9	Because normally when investors get scared as they were that day, they sell risky things like stocks to buy stuff that they see as safer.
1:47.5	And historically, that safer thing has been U.S. government bonds. Treasuries. When you buy U.S. Treasuries, you're handing over a wad of cash
1:54.7	to the government today for the promise of getting that wad of cash back plus interest in like five or
	...

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