"The world's wanker"

For "wanker" read "banker". 

The four short fragments below are from "Today Is Our Dependence Day" (Aug 26, 2025) by Maia Mindel at Some Unpleasant Arithmetic, on Substack.

The topic is foreign exchange, trade deficits, and US economic policy. Mindel writes:

"But the US [dollar] isn’t just any currency. It’s the global reserve currency. This means, basically, that the US has to export a lot of services like lending currency to other countries, at the expense of having an artificially strong dollar..."

"The way the system works is that everyone agrees to give the United States free stuff in exchange for financial assets, and in return the Ameriburgers act as a mix of banker, venture capitalist, insurance company, and central banker, which borrows short-term in safe dollars to invest long-term in risky ventures worldwide, and provides safe assets to other countries during global crises. This dynamic is the bedrock of the global economy, but its stability is entirely contingent on one thing: the credibility of the United States."

"To retain its global economic hegemony, the US must stay a reliable and well-run country. Its number one responsibility is to provide an unlimited supply of truly safe assets that every single other country in the world can depend on."

"The consequence of a crisis of confidence against America would be total global economic bedlam. Fearful investors would dump U.S. assets, sucking liquidity out of the American economy and wrecking all global currencies as they tried to [find] somewhere to park. The last time the global hegemon failed so badly was in 1929."

It'll be worse, this time.