I wonder if it has anything to do with the currency apparently being backed by an immense reserve of oil (proven to the world by this year's geopolitical events), then coal, and then a massive amount of renewable solar, hydro, wind kWh's and infrastructure to deliver it to homes and shops.
More and more it feels like a nation's kWh throughput is the new metric to track its global influence in manufacturing, industry, and financial services. In other words electric power now equates to global power.
I've always sort-of-joked[1] about a "Blood Standard": your status as reserve currency is proportional to the percentage of the world population your nation can murder in 12 months.
Puts a hard floor on nations with strategic nuclear deterrents - they can never fall below a fairly high threshold, no matter how much of a "Security State Zombie" their national economies have become.
I mean, Russia's currency is in the toilet, and if even just 10% of their nukes are actually functional they probably kill a significant percentage of the world pop.
Russia's desperately terrible internal financials, applied to any nation lacking strategic deterrence, would have brought them a lot more pain.
I sort of jokingly contend that they're floated by a theoretical "Blood Standard", in addition to the very distributed basket of commodities they built their country on top of.
The problem here is that I've got the mechanism reversed. Blood Standard measures negative power - the capacity to destroy. Reserve status tracks positive power - the ability to keep other states from destruction. So maybe what the Blood Standard really represents is super-sovereignty - you never get under the thumb of IMF, you never get invaded, you don't lose control of internal monetary policy a la Argentina.
Thinking about it, the Swiss break this model, but from the other direction. "We will never ever screw with you" and in return they get seen as safe.
Again it's a bit of a lark, but it's not as funny anymore, as the growth curve in positive economics hits some natural physical limits along with a very deep gravity well.
> In other words electric power now equates to global power.
In living memory, has this not been the case? Oil's use as an energy source is far more meaningful than its material use.
Part of why I always questioned why calling a country a "gas station" was supposed to be insulting. Yea, that's the main ingredient of being a world power.
More and more it feels like a nation's kWh throughput is the new metric to track its global influence in manufacturing, industry, and financial services. In other words electric power now equates to global power.