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Analysts have been warning of the dollar's impending doom. I don't want to be overly dramatic, but I think it's. I will use the word doomed in the long term. The US dollar is the most powerful currency that exists today. It's accepted and traded almost everywhere in the world and has shown strong resilience through numerous financial shocks and mounting fiscal debt. The US dollar for the last couple of decades has been the preeminent global currency in virtually every dimension you can think of. It allows us to have a great demand for our currency and for our bonds. So it often allows us to live a bit beyond our means so we can borrow easily and at low interest rates in the world to finance economic growth. But some experts worry that the dollar's dominance may be under threat. We tend to think that nothing could ever dislodge the dollar from this preeminent status as the world's currency. That view is overblown and ultimately will be challenged. So what poses a threat to the dollar status as the world's reserve currency? And just how long can its dominance last? America's growing account deficit is one of the biggest threats to the dollar. The US dollar ought to be under threat. After all, the US government has been running massive deficits for a long time, which should in principle be reflected in high inflation, which in turn should reduce the dollar's value and the dollar's role as an international currency. This is most evident in America's current account deficit, which means the value of imported goods and services exceeds the value of exported goods and services. The current account balance, as we call it, has been in deficit every single year since the early 1980s. Some years it's modest and some years it's big and right now it's big in the US. During the fourth quarter of 2021, the US current account deficit hit $217.9 billion, amounting to 3.6% of America's GDP. Experts like Stephen Roach believe that this growing deficit is directly related to a low national saving rate. And when countries do not save, which is the case in the United States, we end up borrowing surplus savings from abroad to square the circle. We can do that because we have this almighty dollar, the world's great reserve currency, and so we have been borrowing massive amounts of foreign savings from abroad, and it provides a relatively painless way of financing our current account deficit until something happens that changes the minds of foreign nations who want to lend us their surplus capital, their surplus saving. And I think there's a risk of that down the road as our international balance of payments deficit continues to expand. The US dollar has been the world's reserve currency since most countries abandoned the gold standard. America went off the gold standard. A ounce of gold split up into 20 pieces each called a dollar. That means a substantial...