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Comment by mriet | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like it's related to Graeber's book, "Debt, The First 5000 Years".

Is that worth reading for someone casually interested in economics and its history? Or is it pretty dense and technical

I found it to be good for casual people economic history. Wasn’t overly “economics” in the technical sense.

It is not technical at all. But it is more dense than a typical non-fiction book you read these days. Also heavily referenced like a scholarly work.

I would highly recommend reading it, as it exposes you to the many biases in the orthodox framework of economic thought prevalent in the world today.

There are single sentences in that book that have half a dozen factual errors.

So, you decide if that is worth reading.

Another book in this vein is The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor if anyone is looking for one.

See also Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50358103-money

And The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession (2e has an intro from Volcker):

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249245.The_Power_of_Gold

With all the talk of the US dollar losing its status (highly unlikely due to no realistic alternative), How Global Currencies Work: Past, Present, and Future on the history of various previously predominant currencies is also interesting:

* https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177007/ho...

There's no obvious alternative but there's nothing stopping other countries from using other currencies than dollars to do transactions, just the infrastructure that supports it. It feels like the dollar is more stable than other countries currencies, due in large part to our strong economy and strong military. China is big enough that they can probably do transactions in their currency, but any week they can significantly devalue it.

> China is big enough that they can probably do transactions in their currency, but any week they can significantly devalue it.

There are roughly as many CAD and AUD transactions as RMB/CNY:

* https://data.imf.org/?sk=e6a5f467-c14b-4aa8-9f6d-5a09ec4e62a...

* https://www.statista.com/statistics/247328/activity-per-trad...

Wow, thanks for posting that. I wasn't away RMB was not used that much up to now. US + Euro is 9/12 of that trading on the imf.org link. 9/12, 75%! Maybe a little of that could switch to rmb in trading with china, but as china is such a huge economy in the world, close to the US in many ways (ignoring their current problems/shrinkage), isn't the minuscule amount of RMB transactions just another sign that everyone is using dollars.

How much is the total US transactions with China, would like to compare to the charts to see theoretical maximum.

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