[belltaco]

> The several countries that tried not to use the usd kinda got penalised, though.

That theory, even though it's floated a lot and is assumed true by otherwise smart people, never made too much sense to me because of the simple fact that a country that's already in the very bad books with the US would be the one that tries to switch to a different currency.

For example Iraq and Libya were already on the list of the countries that the US would take military action against, for several strong reasons nothing to do with currencies, before they floated the idea of switching to a different reserve currency. So it's correlation rather than causation.