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Which is not to say that it shouldn't lose that status. The great advantage of having your own currency be the world's reserve currency is that when you run up debts with the rest of the world, you can just print more dollars to pay 'em off. This enables the United States to carry its immense budget and trade deficits. Convenient, but hardly prudent in the long term, no?
Yes, hardly prudent. But if Bretton-Woods should be abandoned and the USD lose its status as the world's reserve currency, the US of A is then in the deepest pile of feces in the monetary history of man.
We in the US enjoy great, nigh on incalculable advantages through the status of the dollar as the agreed upon reserve currency for the world. The mass of the world's transactions for everything from the price of oil to loads of food are carried out in dollars. Other currencies are valued against the dollar. At the moment the USD loses its status as the reserve currency, it must actually begin to pay for its current account deficits via something other than the printing press.
The short version is this: The dollar, with all of our budget deficits and trade imbalances, only has value because other nations agree that it has value. Take that away and you get to experience what it must have been like to have piles of confederate money at the end of the civil war.
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