The recent troubles with the US dollar – it has fallen more than 10 percent against other major currencies since the start of 2025 – have led to renewed questions about its future. How long will it remain the world’s primary currency? What would it take to finally knock it out of place? And if it falls, what will take its place – a new dominant reserve currency, a basket of quasi-reserve currencies, perhaps even something from the cryptoverse?
It is in this debate that Barry Eichengreen’s new book, Money across bordersis thrown. His contribution is to address the future of the dollar by placing it in the context of the past.
Eichengreen sees the US dollar not so much as a unique monetary artifact, but rather as the latest in a long line of ‘global currencies’ – commanding widespread international use – beginning with Athenian silver coins of the sixth century BC and extending through the Roman denarius, the Byzantine solidus (the ‘dollar of the Middle Ages’), the Florentine florin, the Spanish ‘pieces of eight’, the Dutch guilder and finally the British pound.
All of these historic global currencies, Eichengreen shows, dominated the monetary scene for at least a century and in some cases considerably longer. But eventually they all became obsolete.
“The status of international currency is not forever,” Eichengreen writes. It is “similar to endowing wealth with natural resources. It can be managed well, in which case it is an asset to current and future generations, or it can be managed poorly, in which case it becomes a curse.”
Eichengreen’s suspicion is that, if and when the US dollar in turn loses its mantle, the wounds will likely be self-inflicted rather than inflicted by a monetary enemy. Among the potentially fatal harms, he cites increased tariffs, America’s escalating budget problems, the undermining of the Federal Reserve’s independence, a more aggressive and widespread use of financial sanctions and a withdrawal from long-standing international alliances. The current US president has leaned in all these directions – sometimes more than just that.
It would be difficult to imagine a more informed guide to the historical precursors of the dollar. Eichengreen, a professor at the University of California, is the author of several books on monetary and financial history, most notably the 1992 Golden chainsan influential account of the gold standard’s role in the Great Depression. With his new book he has produced a learned and highly readable history of the making and breaking of international currency.
Yet Eichengreen proves strangely reluctant to push his own historical logic. The global currencies of the past largely disappear from view when he finally focuses on the dollar and its prospects.
This is not due to a lack of opportunities to draw parallels. Eichengreen suggests that several former global currencies – the florin, the guilder and the pound sterling – have been partially undone by the ‘financialization’ of their domestic economies: monetary dominance encouraged specialization in finance at the expense of productive industrial investment. The reader might reasonably expect financialization to reemerge as Eichengreen assesses the threats to the dollar. After all, the financialization of the modern American economy, in which profit making has shifted from industry to the financial sector, has been widely documented. But no: when we talk about the dollar, there is no financialization anywhere. Eichengreen’s view on the dollar’s vulnerability is mainly about politics, not economics.
It also makes you wonder about the book’s audience. There is little news for experts. Meanwhile, more general readers risk getting bogged down in technical details and will search largely in vain for connections to broader social issues. This is primarily a book about money in its technical functionality, and not about money as a structural way to organize society.
We occasionally see glimpses of how monetary arrangements shape social relations. “The bankers did well,” Eichengreen writes of the refusal of 15th-century Florentine elites to lower the florin, “but the workers did not, with consequences including greater income inequality and weakened social cohesion.” But for the most part, he seems blasé about the social costs of hierarchical currency arrangements – the unequal distribution of economic power and opportunity they entrench – even in the countries that enjoy currency dominance, not to mention those on the wrong side of it.
Critics from across the political spectrum have noted how an overvalued dollar, by making U.S. exports less competitive, has contributed to the erosion of manufacturing and working-class communities in the residual belt, fueling the political upheavals of the past decade, including the rise of Donald Trump and the Maga movement.
But Eichengreen is having none of it. If U.S. exporters struggle with a strong dollar, he says, all they need to do is take compensatory measures: “invest more in factories and equipment, better train their workers, develop new products and processes.”
This is extraordinary to write: as if such steps had not occurred to the exporters in question; and as if manufacturers in China and other competitive markets, with cheaper currencies, couldn’t also accept them.
In moments like these, Money across borders appears dazzling. But in many ways it is also a great book.
Money beyond borders: global currencies from Croesus to Crypto by Barry Eichengreen Princeton £25, 344 pages
Brett Christophers is a professor at Uppsala University and author of ‘The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet’
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