[ad_1]
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
There is much fallout this evening and there will be for months stemming from the arraignment of the Republican frontrunner in Manhattan yesterday and we’re going to cover that in some detail, but we want to start tonight with a trend that we have noticed that might be worth knowing about and it has to do with the dollar. For nearly 80 years since the end of the Second World War, the U.S. dollar has effectively been the currency of the world for our entire lifetimes. There was virtually no place on the entire globe you could go that would turn down a 20. Andrew Jackson’s face beside the famous seal of the U.S. Treasury was probably America’s best-known export.
From Dar es salaam to Sri Lanka to the smallest gold mining outpost in the Amazon basin. Every shopkeeper on Earth recognized a $20 bill. The dollar was universal and not just universal in commerce, though the majority of international transactions were conducted in dollars, but universally held as a long-term store of value globally.
The world’s central bank stockpiled U.S. dollars far more than any other currency. Now, most Americans may not have known that, or they did, but it doesn’t matter what they knew. It was very good for everyone who lives here. Because there were so many U.S. dollars in circulation outside of the country, the cost of borrowing money inside the country remained artificially low and that’s one of the reasons that in this country, America, middle-class people could buy their own homes. The U.S. government, meanwhile, was able to run up astronomical debts without many obvious consequences.
Now, from time to time, the Congress would debate something called the debt ceiling, but it was abstract. For most people, the entire topic didn’t seem very relevant to their lives because, for most of the time, it really wasn’t. America printed the U.S. dollar. We controlled the global reserve currency and that meant that for us, money was…
[ad_2]
