> Currencies fundamentally relate to some trust.

A quant partner at Goldman said to me once that the thing that's different about currencies relative other normal financial products is whereas you might buy JPMC or oil or a bond because you like JP Morgan or oil or think rates are going to move in a particular direction or whatever whatever, you never just buy the dollar. You are always trading one currency for another eg selling GBP to buy USD. What that means is currencies are always about the value of one currency relative to other currencies.

In that sense they do fundamentally relate to trust and in particular specifically in this case about trust of the US economy and financial system's stability as opposed to other economies and financial systems.

So there have been times (eg during the financial crisis) where people think all currencies are bad but you can't just sell all of them so typically they would sell the other ones for dollars. For me, de-dollarization is about the choice of central reserve banks to hold dollar assets but also about other financial players changing their "default currency denominator" when they're doing this kind of trade.

Multipolar? So kind of like Europe before the beginning of World War 1, with major powers all competing with each other?

> I believe that the near-term de-dollarization isn't as much trust erosion as it is a tool to provide monetary penalty for behaving in unpredictable ways.

How is that different from trust erosion?

> I believe that the near-term de-dollarization isn't as much trust erosion as it is a tool to provide monetary penalty for behaving in unpredictable ways.

Sure, everyone else is also acting based on childish emotions now, not just the US president. It's not about retaliation at all, it's about reducing suddenly very imminent risks.