Rhea Werner’s Reviews > Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider's View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead > Status Update

Macron - Europe-wide defense bond

SDR - more transparent (!)

The U.K. government’s default on its debts
to the U.S. government in 1931 was unquestionably an important step on the
way to the passing of the baton from the pound sterling to the dollar.

In the eurozone, however, there is no unified fiscal authority. As a result, the cost of any reduction in the value of debt that the ECB holds, either through outright default or through high inflation, is spread around the eurozone’s membership, in proportion to their share in the central bank. The gains, however, are concentrated on the country that issued the debt, which gets a lower interest rate.

These earlier currency unions, however, all revolved around hard pegs to a convertible currency and so were not true fiat currencies.8 (A fiat currency is a government-issued money that is not backed by gold or any physical commodity, but only by trust in the issuing authority

There were other currency unions before Euro
1. The Central African
Economic and Monetary Community,
2. West African Economic and MonetaryUnion,
3. Eastern Caribbean Monetary Union

Debt in Japan
- tried to use gov spending stimulus to counter the effects of its growth & financial crisis.
- kept on buying lots of infra
- Japanese high debt burden helps by Japanese (comp to US, more foreigners hold it)