"This book started out as a biography of the dollar, not of a man. It was intended to be an international version of the story I had told in The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort (2011). That book was a biography of the Fed, as seen through the analytical lens of...

The global dollar system, though repeatedly reported to be on its last legs—most recently in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, but most famously in the Nixon devaluation of 1971—has repeatedly instead consolidated and gone on to further geographical expansion (McCauley 2021). The key...