[caeril]

Oh, it will definitely be extraordinarily painful.

But the thing is, it's inevitable. And the longer we put off the day of reckoning, the more painful it will be.

The rest of the world should have de-dollarized and moved to floating reserve baskets and flexible settlements in 1971 after Nixon told everyone that if they expected their dollars to be backed by anything other than unicorn farts, they can go eat a dick.

Bretton Woods II was apparently too convenient for the world to discard. My personal tinfoil hat opinion is that certain very-low-time-preference East Asian powers encouraged adoption of Bretton Woods II specifically to make us soft and easy to topple a century later.

But now, it's too late. We can either start producing actual goods and services for export again and get our trade deficit down to a reasonable level, in anticipation of the inevitability of de-dollarization, or we could pretend it's not a problem, and experience a colossal currency crisis in 40 years ANYWAY.

I prefer the former.