US Dollar

The US dollar is the currency of the United States and acts as a reserve currency for international commerce. The dollar is the canonical exemplar of fiat money. While fiat money has no backing, its efficacy as a currency is measured in terms of its monetary velocity and the amount of bank assets and private debt that is denominated in the currency. This is effectually a measure of its success for a currency's core purpose—to provide a stable and reliable means of exchange as a social-financial technology for enabling economic productivity. The financial historian Adam Tooze writes of the dollar:

Fiat money is backed by "nothing" other than the trifling matter of tens of trillions of dollars in private credit, the rule of law and the power of the state, itself inserted into a state system. In other words, the entire structure of global macrofinance.

Properties

The dollar is a currency.

The dollar is issued by a central bank.

The dollar is a public good.

The dollar is inflationary.

The dollar has no fundamental value.

The dollar has no income-cashflows.

The dollar is not a speculative investment.

The dollar has no use value.

The dollar has a present value of zero.

The dollar has a terminal value of zero.

The dollar is a non-productive asset.

The dollar is not a security.

References

• Tooze, A (2021), “Chartbook newsletter #15: Talking and reading about Bitcoin”, accessed online on 15 November 2021 : https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-newsletter-15.
• Eich, Stefan. 2018. ‘The Currency of Politics’. The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes.
• Varoufakis, Yanis. 2021. ‘What Is Money, Really? And Why Bitcoin Is Not the Answer (Even If Blockchain Is Brilliant & Potentially Helpful in Democratising Money)’. Yanis Varoufakis (blog). 2 August 2021. https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2021/08/02/what-is-money/.
• Steele, Graham. 2021. ‘The Miner of Last Resort: Digital Currency, Shadow Money and the Role of the Central Bank’. Technology and Government, Emerald Studies in Media and Communications, Forthcoming.
• Hockett, Robert C. 2019. ‘Money’s Past Is Fintech’s Future: Wildcat Crypto, the Digital Dollar, and Citizen Central Banking’.
• Bazzani, Giacomo. 2020. ‘Money as a Tool for Collective Action’. Partecipazione e Conflitto 13 (1): 438–61. https://doi.org/10.1285/i20356609v13i1p438.
• Larue, Louis. 2020. ‘“A Conceptual Framework for Classifying Currencies”.’ International Journal of Community Currency Research 24 (1): 45–60.
• *———. n.d. ‘The Case against Alternative Currencies’. Politics, Philosophy & Economics 0 (0): 1470594X211065784. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470594X211065784.