Mark Twain never actually said "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." But the misquote is too delicious to die a natural death of its own. And nowhere is the idea behind it more relevant than in discussions of the dollar's international role.
Pundits have been saying last rites for the dollar's global dominance since the 1960s — that is, for more than a half-century now. The point can be shown by occurrences of the phrase "demise of the dollar" in all English-language publications catalogued by Google.
The frequency of such mentions, adjusted for the number of printed pages per year, first jumped in 1969, following the collapse of the London Gold Pool, an arrangement in which eight central banks cooperated to support the dollar's peg to gold. Use of the phrase soared in the 1970s, following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, of which the dollar was the linchpin, and in response to the high inflation that accompanied the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in the 1970s.
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