The US Exports Inflation and in return the World Pays for the US Debt
When foreign central banks collect new dollars by printing their own money these dollars are not just used to pay off foreign debts. Countries are pressured into loaning their dollar savings to the US, buying Treasury bonds. The US debt continues to this day as the safest haven for countries to store their foreign exchange reserves, especially at times of international economic and political stress. In practice, this means they are driven to make loans to the US so that the US can keep buying their goods. The US government can run up debt by conjuring dollars out of thin air, to be spent on cheapened imports that prop up US consumer society. The foreign central banks recycle dollars back to the US Treasury to maintain their own currencies' exchange rate with the dollar. This set-up keeps other nations lending the new dollars they gained back to help pay for the ballooning US debt. As Treasury bonds, these dollars are taken out of circulation, so create little inflation at home, although they previously did when the US circulated them overseas.
Through this scheme, foreign countries hold savings as dollar reserves and loans to the US, loans now beyond the ability of the US to repay. The US supports itself by sending paper IOUs abroad to buy other countries' goods with these unpayable IOUs. Meanwhile, the US keeps its gold reserves intact and prices stable. Already half a century ago, European finance ministers had complained about this export of US inflation, to which Nixon's Treasury Secretary John Connally responded the "dollar is our currency, but your problem."
Michael Hudson explains in simple terms the dollar's role as the international currency: "Let's suppose that you go to the grocery store and you buy food and then sign an IOU for everything that you buy. You go to a liquor store, IOU. You buy a car, IOU. You get everything you want just for an IOU. But when people try to collect the IOUs, you say, 'That IOU isn't for collecting from me. Trade it among yourselves. Think of it as your savings, and trade it among yourselves. Treat it as an asset, just as you treat a dollar bill saved in a cookie jar and not spent.' Well you'd get a free ride. You'd be allowed to go and write IOUs for everything, and nobody could ever collect. That's what the United States position is, and that's what it wants to keep."
Hudson adds, again simplifying it, "That's what makes the United States the 'exceptional country.' The value of our currency is based on other countries' savings. The money they save has to be held in the form of dollars or securities that we're never going to repay, even if we could." The US has established an international system requiring other countries to use the dollar, obliging them to stockpile them in the trillions, and coercing them to make loans to finance a US debt that will never be paid.
The US, protecting the dollar as the world's reserve currency, is not subject to the same rules other countries are: it can spend more than it produces, maintaining its consumerist lifestyle, by simply printing more dollars. It can use this extra money to gain control of goods and resources, giving them inflation and debt in exchange. Since these exported dollars often return home through now uncollectible loans as Treasury Bonds, they do not remain within the US economy to cause rising prices.
This scheme the preserves what George Kennan delicately labelled the "pattern of relationships" that upholds the "disparity" of the imperial economic system. To enforce this scam, the US has built military bases in throughout the world - much of this dollar cost returned to the US through the same operation - ready to act against nations seeking to get off the dollar standard.
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