If you follow the geopolitics, you might reasonably conclude that the dollar’s dominance has peaked and is now declining. The SCO appears to believe there can be a transition away from the dollar, an idea that could turn out to be dangerously wrong at a time of great but generally unrecognised currency fragility. At the heart of the issue there is a worrying lack of distinction between the dollar’s reserve function and its function as the monetary standard from when it replaced gold in 1971. -Alasdair Macleod