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Multipolar (MLPT): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Multipolar | Fortune

Multipolar (MLPT): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

The U.S. dollar has long been the bedrock of global trade, investment, and reserve strategy, but cracks are starting to show. From BRICS nations promoting alternative payment systems to central banks in Asia and the Gulf trimming their dollar holdings, momentum is building for a more multipolar currency regime. As Washington increasingly uses the dollar as a geopolitical lever—imposing sanctions, freezing assets, and enforcing capital controls—some allies and rivals alike are hedging their bets. Meanwhile, China is quietly expanding the renminbi’s reach through oil deals, digital infrastructure, and Belt and Road partnerships. Will the greenback remain the world’s most trusted currency or are we entering a new era where financial power is far more diffused?

Still the One?  Can the U.S. Dollar Remain the World's Reserve Currency?

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Well speaking of big ideas, this next panel should be a banger. I think it's a really interesting one. It was alluded to beforehand the future of the US dollar and specifically question the heart of global markets, and one few people would have dared to ask even a decade ago. Can the US dollar hold its position as the world's reserve currency? For generations, the dollar has been the foundation of trade, investment, and global reserves, but the landscape is starting to shift. BRICS economies are testing an alternative payment system. Central banks in Asia and the Gulf are diversifying their holdings, and China is expanding the reach of the renminbi through energy deals, digital networks, and Belt and Road partnerships. So we look at a future where the dollar remains supreme, a world where financial power is far more distributed. To help us understand what's really at stake, we're pleased to be joined by journalist and author Paul Bluestein, who's been studying and reporting on the global monetary system for nearly 4 decades. He'll be in conversation with Fortunes Andrew Staples. Thank you very much. Here they come. Good morning. I'm delighted to welcome my guest for this session, a very topical look at the dollar. We have the author Paul Bluestein of King Dollar. Paul, I'm going to kick off with a very general question. What prompted you to write this book? Why are we hearing so much about this issue of de-dollarization at the moment. Yeah, well, when I started it, there was already a good bit of talk about the dollar losing its dominance because of the overuse of weaponization of the dollar, overuse of sanctions. This was in the first Trump administration, even going back to the to the late second Obama administration, there was a good bit of talk and then of course uh uh during in the course of the uh. First few months of the first few weeks, sorry, of the uh of the Trump administration that that talk has risen to a fever pitch. So yes, I, I'm happy to say that the book is is uh is timely, but um uh but uh yeah, there's lots of been lots of speculation which I. Which which I strongly disagree. Well, let's get into it. King dollar is the crown slipping or not, over to you. I don't think so. I mean this is what I've spent the better part of 5 years, you know, thinking about and I'm still thinking about, still wrestling with. Um, and, and the conclusion I come to is very, you know, this is pretty much the verbatim wording from the, from the first chapter of the book. I say that the dollar's position, it's, as the dominant currency. I'm talking about its position in, in international commerce and cross border transactions of all kinds that that position is, is all but impregnable, barring. Catastrophic missteps by the US government. Now, have there been missteps by the US government, uh, in, in my opinion, in the past few months there have been quite a, quite a number. Are they catastrophic in, in some ways, yes. Are they catastrophic enough to dislodge the dollar from its dominant position? I don't think so. So let me, let me tell you as briefly as I can why. The book goes into a lot of episodes over the past, uh, you know, a little more than half a century in which, uh, in which the dollar's dominance was called into question. Uh, there was the, uh, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 when President Nixon took the dollar off completely off of gold. There was the inflation of the 1970s. There was the swelling of US trade deficits in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s. Um, the rise of Japan and when there was a lot of speculation that the yen would supplant the dollar, there was the, uh, the establishment of the euro and there was a lot of talk that the euro would at least equal the dollar, if not surpass it. There was the global financial crisis at that time, a lot of people said, OK, that's it, the dollar is finished, and of course the rise of China when there's been a lot of speculation about the renminbi replacing the dollar and at each of those junctures, uh, some really, uh, you know, it wasn't just um. Uh, uh, uh, casual commenting, it was people from very distinguished positions in the academic world saying that the dollar's dominance was threatened and in every case, in every instance, those prophecies turned wrong and for very good reason. Because the dollar uniquely among currencies has two very important features, two important features that are that are that together make it unique. One is an open capital account. Money can flow freely across US borders, and the second is, which is I think in many ways even more important is the depth and breadth and liquidity of of US financial markets and particularly the market for obligations of the US government. This is so crucial in a financial crisis, um. In a financial crisis when everyone's scrambling for cash, they want to make sure that they have the cash to pay obligations coming due. If you don't have the cash to pay your obligations coming due, you're the next Lehman Brothers, and treasuries are the one asset by far more than any other that you can that if you hold, you can liquidate in large amounts and get and get the cash you need without suffering terrible losses. So. Uh, so that that's an extremely important feature for, uh, this is these two features together make are, are, I think the, the, the bedrock of dollar dominance. Now I mentioned, now my book came out in March, uh, and within days of its publication came Liberation Day. And all the turmoil in financial markets in which in which the dollar was falling, the treasuries were falling, stocks were falling, and this was quite unusual confluence of events, a lot of speculation that the dollar this time, OK, this time this is really it for the dollar, and then that was followed by the attacks on the Federal Reserve by Trump on the Federal Reserve independence and the passage of the one big beautiful bill, quote unquote, which added to US debt problems. Um, and that has led to even more speculation that the dollar is dominant. Now my publisher, Yale University Press, got in touch with me and said we're going to have a paperback edition coming out. You need to write a new preface for your book to take account of the events of the past few months, and it's been very tempting for me to say, OK, these are the catastrophic missteps of which I warned. These, yes. This, uh, the dollar has been dominant all this time, but because of these catastrophic missteps, it's, yes, I now think it's going to lose its dominance. I don't think that's true, partly for the, you know, the two reasons that I mentioned, uh, that make the dollar uniquely, uh, uh, the unique features it has that bolster dominance, but also because the dollar is so entrenched in the way markets work around the world. So, so on that point, I mean, there are certainly jurisdictions around the world thinking about China, Russia, that would bristle that they have to use the US dollar, and the US has not been shy increasingly of weaponizing the US dollar system as well. So how if you do have An economy the size of China and other economies that work closely with China and beyond that you have other countries that would prefer to move away from the dollar because of that dependency and the risk of it being weaponized. How is the dollar's position so unassailable? You mentioned liquidity and so on, but what about alternatives? What about the euro? What about the yen and so on? Yeah, they, they, they, the euro has a lot of the features that the dollar has. It has the eurozone has a lot of sophisticated financial markets, but it doesn't have a single sovereign debt instrument because you've got 20 sovereign nations, each of which issue their own, their own debt, so it's not like the US Treasury market. It doesn't have that that big deep broad and liquid market for one. uh, government instrument, uh, the renminbi doesn't have a, an open capital account, you know, very important in a crisis. You want to make sure that you're going to be able to get your money out of the country, uh, and there are a lot of concerns by investors that, that, that, that they wouldn't be able to do that. But I, I completely. Understand the frustration of governments around the world with the way the US has used its currency to bully other countries for foreign policy purposes. That's the frustration and desire to move away from the dollar is understandable, but It isn't governments that decide which currency is dominant. It is markets. So let me, let me come back to my point about how entrenched the dollar is in, in the functioning of world markets. Uh, so you know, anyone who's casually looked at the dollar dominance. As I'm sure many people in the audience have know that, you know, the dollar is comprises about 60% of the reserves held by central banks around the world, the foreign exchange reserves. It's used for a roughly similar amount in international trade, imports and exports for invoicing. And uh and it's, and it's the currency that's dominant in uh when countries and companies borrow in currencies other than their own, they borrow in dollars more than any other and in foreign exchange markets, the dollar is on one side of, of, of trades for when currencies are converted one into the other. But let me tell you about a market that I mean there are probably some people in this audience who are familiar with it, maybe they even participate in it. But many of you, I'm suspecting will not have heard of it. This is the only chart I have in my book because it, this just, this was the aha moment for me, the moment that just blew me away in terms of understanding the durability of dollar dominance is a market is a market for foreign exchange swaps. It's it's a pretty obscure market, but it is gigantic. And the uh the data on this is put together by the Bank for International Settlements, and foreign exchange swaps are are a market in which the very biggest actors in the global financial system play multinational companies, multinational banks, insurance companies, pension funds, hedge funds that have that have operate in in dozens of countries. And the BIS estimated that the volume of trading in this market of activity in this market is 5 $trillion trillion. That's with a T dollars a day on average. And what, what, what is this market used for? It's used for hedging. This isn't a market where people are trading one currency for another or speculating on where currencies. This is where these are these very big firms that are that are trying to hedge. Themselves against fluctuations in currency markets. So a great example, what am I talking about? A Japanese life insurance company, for example, which wants to invest a lot of its money in dollar assets in treasuries, but other American stocks, other things. But they, so they, they, they have, they use dollars, but they need yen to pay their claimants when they're, when they're, when they, when people die, right? They have to pay their their claims in dollars. So they need to hedge that a company like that needs to hedge itself against movements in the dollar in the dollar yen rate. So, Uh, so they use this market to hedge and the, and what is the currency that absolutely dominates this $5 trillion a day market? It's the dollar, way above the euro, way above the yen, way above the pound sterling, way above the Swiss franc, and others. And so this is, this means that the biggest actors in the global financial system are using dollars for, you know, for investing, for lending, for borrowing, for exporting, for if you imagine what it would take to unwind all that, it would be so costly, so difficult, and take such a long time. So you know, this is why I say entrenched. It's entrenched. The dollar is entrenched, like it or not, for better or for worse, it's entrenched. Um, what could shake that entrenchment? For example, we've been hearing a lot about crypto, we've been hearing a lot more recently about stablecoins, for example. That's sort of one area. So technology and innovation there. The other one you mentioned earlier on is the sort of policy missteps that the US government might make. And earlier in the year we were hearing a lot about a potential Mar a Lago accord which might have, you know, big implications for the US dollar. Your your comments on Well, you know, yeah, a Mar a Lago card in my view would be a catastrophic policy misstep. Um, it would, and, you know, I don't want to underestimate the potential catastrophic consequences of those missteps. I'm, I'm very much agree that that these things could lead to a financial crisis, uh, you know, the and you don't even have to go to as far as the Mar a Lago accord, you know, if you have uh. you know, more pressure on the Fed to, to, you know, just print money to cover US deficits. I can easily imagine that leading to a big selloff in Treasury securities. Interest rates would rise. The US would suffer some pretty severe economic consequences of that. A Mar a Lago accord, you know, this is, this is this talk, you know, we want, we want to make the dollar go down, but we want to preserve dollar dominance, so we will tax Treasury securities held. Abroad by foreigners that will tax the interest that we pay, that would have a devastating consequence on the market for treasuries. It could lead to a quite severe financial crisis. I don't, I don't want to underestimate that, but you know, the loss of dollar dominance would be the least of our worries in that case. I mean, if we have a real severe crisis in the market for US Treasury, the most important financial market in the world. loss of dollar dominance is, um, is, is, is going to pale by comparison with, with, with the other awful consequences of that. So that's a scenario that we could look through. What about the tech side of things, the stablecoins and so on? What does that mean, if anything, for for dollar dos? Well, isn't it? Ironic, you know, the crypto industry which started off in this, in these uh with these idealistic gauzy ideas, you know, that we're gonna, we're going to create a form of monetary transmission that, that, uh, you know, that avoids banks, central banks, governments entirely. And now they are touting themselves as, as, you know, we're going to help the dollar because after all, stable coins, which are, you know, are tied to fiat dollars, 99% of them are backed by are linked to the dollar and thanks to the legislation that was passed this summer, the Genius Act, they, they are reasonably. You're reliably backed by by reserves of dollars and so now the crypto industry is saying this is going to help the dollar. This is going to save the dollar. Well, first of all, I don't think the dollar needs saving for the reasons we've just been talking about, but stablecoins could actually undermine the the most important benefit that the US gets from dollar dominance. I think the most important. Benefit which is its ability to use the dollar for for for foreign policy leverage because stablecoins can because they are now the crypto industry argues that it's very easy to trace but the blockchain is transparent. You can you can it makes it much easier to catch crooks. I'm sorry, but, but really they're really clever people in the. To space know how to use these types of instruments in ways that disguise their identity and disguise their activities, and I think sanctions evasion is going to become a bigger problem actually for for the US, but of course it's being pushed as this great, great way to help to help dollar dominance. I doubt that it will have, it'll have some effect on the margin. Uh, but I, I doubt that it'll be more than that. Yeah, we've certainly seen China and its trade with other nations, particularly Belt and Road, um, all those nations involved in Belt and Road. Settling their trade more in renminbi and so on with Russia, with Iran, with other parts of the world as well. Is this something that could shake the dollar dominance, or is this really just on the margins? I think it's on the margins. I mean, I think it's it's certainly important for China because they want to, they want to make themselves resilient against. The possibility of the US using types of sanctions against them that were used against Russia, you know, I think if the US used those types of sanctions against China, an economy that's 10 times the size of Russia's. Uh, that the consequences because as we've just seen in the in the trade war, you know, the trade conflict between the US and China, we've just seen that China has a lot of tools of leverage at its own disposal, so I think the consequences of that would be quite disastrous anyway, but, but the Chinese want to make darn sure for quite understandable reasons that they are not vulnerable to that kind of. Thing and they've done quite a good job, I think, of making their own bilateral trade with other countries, uh, much more renminbi denominated, but is the renminbi being used as the way the dollar is in third country trade, in other words, between countries that are neither, you know, China nor the US, no, it's, it's not being used. It's not being used for that purpose. It's not internationalized to that extent, so I don't think it poses a threat to dollar dominance. Yeah, and it's interesting, isn't it, because the states in many other areas such as, you know, world police, being the world policeman and trade and so on seems to be stepping stepping back from that hegemonic role, but they want the dollar to remain. As it is, yeah, OK, um, just coming into the last few seconds and looking out ahead, we've talked about sort of policy mistakes that could shake the dominance of the of the dollar. I'm reminded of that quote by Hemingway that we've heard a couple of times this year as well, things, you know, gradually, then all of a sudden, what could be that flip? What could make things change? Well, you know, I mean a Mar a Lago, I suppose I don't think it's likely that they'll do that because I think they've realized that it would, it would have catastrophic consequences. you know, one of the scenarios that I've I've tried to think of, you know, what could shake the dollar? What, what, and the one that I one that I'm come up with and and I hope no one will be offended is. I imagine the following conversation taking place somewhere in the in the inner sanctum of the White House where the First Lady says to the president, Donald, you know, Barron is, you've always say Baron is such a smart boy. Well, he thinks that bitcoin should become the legal tender or currency of the United States. Don't you think that, don't you agree that he's such a smart boy? And now, do I think this is likely to lead to some change? In the legal tender laws in the United States, I don't, I don't think it's likely, but it's kind of horrifying to think, well, it's conceivable. So yeah, that would be one, that would be one scenario if you like. Yeah, something for us to watch out for then. But in the meantime it looks like we'll be using the dollar for some time, I think so, yeah, OK, well, with that, thank you very much and please join me in thanking Paul for his thoughts on the dollar. Thank you. Thank you very much. OK. Yeah, I go.

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