"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws" - some antisemitic shill pretending to be Mayer Anshelm Rothschild When trade is delineated in your currency, you delineate trade. If kb, bb and wo are trading partners, and we all trade in kbbux, I get more trade by printing more kbbux. You don't. And yeah - obviously you can raise your price in kbbux but now you're reacting to me... and wo is not only reacting to me, he's reacting to you reacting to me. Meanwhile if wo experiences a crisis and his currency plummets, his goods become cheap to me. If my currency plummets the value of your trade goods plummets, too. And when you're talking major trade, you're talking major bux. Borrow a little money and the bank owns you. Borrow a lot of money and you own the bank. When your currency is the peg, the bank - the rest of the world - has to play along with you.The question I've never seen answered is why would China want the rmb to become a global reserve?
I understand why it's advantageous. What I meant was with China specifically I don't think that the price tag that comes along with being a reserve currency is affordable for them. Firstly, it will curb exports, and second, it will demand that they play by world rules (even if they're more in a position to dictate those rules, we still need a rules based system--which they have never been keen on domestically or internationally). China showed a few summers ago that they will do anything to avoid a domestic economic calamity, and I therefore doubt they'd be interested in creating one out of nothing just to project soft power overseas. Maybe if they start to adopt a more interventionist foreign policy (beyond just stealing territory from neighbors), then it makes more sense. Unless that happens, I don't think they're there yet.