[ksec]

>Power should be measured in relative terms not absolute.

I would argue everything should be measured in relative terms. More often than not this is not the case.

>The US would have to be keeping up with China, India, and rest of world to maintain its previous pole position.

This is the biggest problem I see. US is not keeping up. Nor its willingness to compete. Taking the US dollar as world reserve currency for granted. Along with host of other benefits ( and responsibility ) that came with it.

There are signs that we may see a global market recession next year. And China may benefits even more.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273326

[smallmancontrov]

> Taking the US dollar as world reserve currency for granted.

It's the exact opposite: US citizens got fed up with the domestic problems created by Triffin's Dilemma and wanted out.

Remember, the "imperial revenue" in our model doesn't get helicoptered into the economy, it pumps assets. Stocks, bonds, and real estate. Your share of the imperial loot is proportional to the value of the assets that you own, and worse, even if you don't have a big house and fat brokerage account you still have to compete with people who do and they're going to bid up the price of anything that doesn't have highly elastic supply. Health care, housing, and education are the ones creating problems. America got a great deal, but most Americans got a raw deal: costs went up, income didn't, misery ensued.

Pumped bonds allow (force, really) the government to run deficits (homework: what breaks if they don't? It happened in Clinton's term, you can go and check) and to some extent that distributes the money. There's the whole services narrative which held that the services sector would pump hard enough to backfill manufacturing, but it never did. The people who got the door slammed in their face are no longer convinced that the door is their path to prosperity and now they want to tear the whole thing down.

If you want to hear an actual economist talk about this, see "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.

[orwin]

The fact that successive US governments choose to use their economic hegemony to pump assets rather than invest in their education and healthcare, or at least in their infrastructure, doesn't contradict the fact that it was a great gift, engineered since Bretton-Woods, confirmed at the Smithsonian institute and a few years later at the Kingston accords (and btw, had nothing to do with gold standard but the convertibility of the Dollar. The gold standard realistically ended in the 50s (died for the 5th time in the US alone), and for the 1st time, stayed dead).

[smallmancontrov]

True. We could have taxed and spent enough to spread the wealth around. We chose not to, and now the proverbial children who weren't embraced by the village are burning it down to feel its warmth.

I'm not against calling reserve currency status a privilege so long as you are crystal clear on the point that it was a privilege for America but a curse for most Americans.