The Rise (and Fall) of the US Dollar w/ Fadhel Kaboub

Upstream

Politics, News, Society & Culture

4.9 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2026

⏱️ 90 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode we're joined by Fadhel Kaboub for a conversation about the US dollar, its hegemony over the globe, and the emerging challenges to this hegemony. Fadhel Kaboub is a Tunisian-American economist, professor of economics at Denison University, president of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and author of Global South Perspectives on substack.

The conversation opens with a historical overview of how the US dollar became the dominant global currency and the power that this brought with it—exploring the petrodollar, the use of sanctions, and other neocolonial mechanisms upheld by the dollar. We then introduce BRICS and exploring how BRICS challenges US dollar hegemony and the limitations to this challenge.

Fadhel then unpacks the ways that US dollar hegemony is and can continue to be challenges through focusing on food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, and industrial/technological sovereignty, which Fadhel unpacks in depth. We then explore some examples of attempts to achieve this kind of sovereignty, beginning with the Alliance of Sahel States and their successes and challenges in seeking sovereignty but looking also at Iran, Cuba, and China.

We explore some concrete examples of how not just the dollar but other colonial currencies both past and present have been utilized to subjugate people and states in the Global South, focusing on the CFA Franc. Fadhel then gives us a sense of the better world that can exist outside of the neocolonial, imperialist structures that dominate today and how that world can be achieved in a concrete way.

Further resources:

Related episodes:

Intermission music: "Capitalocene" by Wes Carroll Confabulation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	D Dolarizing cannot happen by decree.
0:23.6	You have to structurally decolonize your entire economy in the food sector,
0:29.6	and the energy sector and the industrial sector.
0:31.6	And as you do that, you liberate your economic structure from these colonial traps you may not
0:40.5	be able to do it by yourself as a small economy but then you can do this as a
0:45.6	regional economic walk and that's why a lot of my work is about South South
0:49.7	Cooperation is about Pan-African regional economic cooperation because all countries in the global south, in Africa in particular, have exactly the same economic traps.
1:00.0	And it's much easier to get out of these traps as a block of countries than as one country at a time.
1:08.0	So that's why I say you can't de-dollarize a system that hasn't been
1:12.3	structurally and economically decolonized yet. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.
1:20.1	A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew
1:26.0	about the world around you.
1:27.9	I'm Della Duncan.
1:29.2	And I'm Robert Raymond.
1:30.7	We hear a lot about de-dollarization these days, and the fall of dollar hegemony seems almost inevitable,
1:37.3	with the emergence of China as a competing superpower, with the BRICS nations and their efforts
1:43.3	to reshape the dynamics of global
1:45.2	trade, and with the obvious decay of the United States both domestically and as a global
1:50.6	power. But what does de-dollarization actually mean? What is dollar hegemony in the first place?
1:58.3	And perhaps most importantly, how is the United States' stranglehold
2:03.4	over the global economy being challenged, not just in the economic realm, but in the political
2:09.0	realm as well? In this episode, we're joined by Faudal Kaboub for a conversation exploring
	...

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