Money Beyond Borders — the making and breaking of global currencies

The US dollar’s recent travails — it has fallen more than 10 per cent against other major currencies since the beginning of 2025 — have led to renewed questioning about its future. How long will it remain the world’s premier currency? What might it take to finally knock it off its perch? And, should it fall, what will replace it — a new dominant reserve currency, a basket of quasi-reserve currencies, perhaps even something from the cryptoverse?

It’s into this debate that Barry Eichengreen’s new book, Money Beyond Borders, is pitched. Its contribution is to tackle the dollar’s future by placing it in the context of the past.

Eichengreen examines the US dollar less as a unique monetary artefact than as the latest in a long line of “global currencies” — those commanding widespread international use — beginning with Athenian silver coins of the sixth century BC and extending through the Roman denarius, the Byzantine solidus (the “dollar of the Middle Ages”), the Florentine florin, the Spanish “pieces of eight”, the Dutch guilder and finally the British pound sterling.

All such historic global currencies, Eichengreen shows, dominated the monetary scene for at least a century and in some cases considerably longer. But all were ultimately superseded.

“International currency status is not forever,” Eichengreen writes. It is “akin to an endowment of natural resource wealth. It can be managed well, in which case it is an asset for current and future generations, or it can be managed poorly, in which case it becomes a curse.”

Eichengreen’s suspicion is that, if and when the US dollar in turn loses its mantle, the wounds will more likely be self-inflicted than exacted by a monetary foe. Among the possible fatal harms, he identifies heightened tariffs, America’s escalating fiscal woes, the undermining of Federal Reserve independence, more aggressive and widespread use of financial sanctions and a retreat from longstanding international alliances. The current US president has leaned — sometimes more than leaned — in all these directions.

It would be difficult to imagine a better-informed guide to the dollar’s historical precursors. A professor at the University of California, Eichengreen is the author of several books of monetary and financial history, notably 1992’s Golden Fetters, an influential account of the role of the gold standard in the Great Depression. With his new book, he has produced a learned and highly readable history of the making and breaking of international currencies.

Yet Eichengreen proves curiously reluctant to press his own historical logic. The global currencies of the past largely recede from view when he finally turns to the dollar and its prospects.

This is not for lack of opportunities to draw parallels. Eichengreen suggests that various former global currencies — the florin, guilder and sterling — were undone partly by “financialization” of their domestic economies: monetary dominance spurred specialisation in finance at the expense of productive industrial investment. The reader might reasonably expect financialisation to resurface when Eichengreen assesses threats to the dollar. After all, the financialisation of the modern US economy, whereby profit-making has migrated from industry to finance, has been widely documented. But no — when we come to the dollar, financialisation is nowhere to be seen. Eichengreen’s take on the vulnerability of the dollar is principally about politics, not economics.

One also wonders about the book’s audience. There is little new here for experts. Meanwhile, more general readers are liable to get bogged down in technical detail and will search largely in vain for connections to wider social issues. This is very much a book about money in its technical functionality, not money as a structural way of organising society.

We see occasional glimpses of how monetary arrangements shape social relations. “The bankers did well,” Eichengreen writes, of the refusal of Florentine elites of the 15th century to debase the florin, “but workers did not, with consequences that included widening income inequality and weakened social cohesion.” For the most part, however, he appears blasé about the social costs of hierarchical currency arrangements — the unequal distribution of economic power and opportunity they entrench — even in those countries that enjoy currency dominance, to say nothing of those on the wrong end of it.

Critics across the political spectrum have noted how an overvalued dollar, by making US exports less competitive, has contributed to the hollowing-out of the manufacturing industry and working-class communities across the rustbelt, helping fuel the political upheavals of the past decade including the rise of Donald Trump and the Maga movement.

But Eichengreen is having none of it. If US exporters are struggling with a strong dollar, he says, all they need do is take counterbalancing steps — “invest more in plant and equipment, train their workers better, develop new products and processes”.

This is an extraordinary thing to write: as if such steps had not occurred to the exporters in question; and as if manufacturers in China and other competitor markets, with cheaper currencies, couldn’t also take them.

At moments like these, Money Beyond Borders comes across as blinkered. But, in many respects, it is also a fine book.

**Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto **by Barry Eichengreen Princeton £25, 344 pages

Brett Christophers is a professor at Uppsala University and author of ‘The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet’

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