America seems to be teetering on collapse, but still I keep hearing about them spreading their influence in eastern Europe and South America. What would have to happen to get them to stop? I know the British Empire collapsed under mountains of debt after WW2, can US imperialism slow down just a little?
KobaCum is right, just wanted to add onto this that by the 50's the pound wasn't the reserve currency of the world anymore, that was the dollar. So it wasn't really possible for the UK to just keep printing pounds, because they'd have to use those pounds to buy dollars to pay back their debts. Because most debts are denominated in dollars, the US is in the unique position as the reserve currency holder to just keep printing to be able to pay off debts that are denominated in the currency that they happen to control. How the world's reserve currency is decided is through hegemonic violence, and right now it's the dollar. If and when the US loses reserve currency status (probably in favour of renminbi) the game will change tremendously, but losing reserve currency status will be a symptom rather than a cause of the declining power of US hegemony.
Eh it'll probably be a mix of the euro, renminbi and the yen. No way anyone's gonna be as dominating the US is. Who knows, maybe gold makes a comeback.
Yeah you're probably right, I'm just dreaming. The world post-US hegemony is going to be a much less stable place with a mixed bag of reserve currencies. We're already headed in that direction.
It really depends. If BRI takes off and becomes a massive economic engine, the RMB might earn hegemony. If the dollar loses its place by piecemeal efforts from various countries around the world, that's a different story.
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