Interestingly, there seems to be more good will and amiable vibes between EU nationalities than within the US even. Even being enemies for a thousand years, I don't doubt that Swedish and Danish men would go to war for one another, or French and German. It's complicated yes, but the continent is more unified in spirit than it may seem to an outsider.

The major benefit of the US Dollar is that you can do things with it. Between export controls, currency controls, laws on foreign ownership, etc, china can pay me all the RMB in the world. I still can’t do a whole lot with it.

The euro has been gaining ground ever since the financial crisis in terms of share of currencies held in global foreign exchange reserves. Less than a third of the US dollar, but still a distant second. Nevertheless, I'm still concerned about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and how intertwined the EU economy is to countries which it has shaky relations with at best.

the yuan has major currency controls. there is a real threat of capital flight destabilization if policies change which is why nobody sane would peg tp the yuan as it is now. that said, countries definitely make bad choices.

I partially agree. But the EU is in a pretty unstable state as incomplete government structure over a collection of peers. "Unstable" does not mean it's going to fall apart. It means it's going to fall apart or coalesce into a single thing (a new country). Or maybe a little of both (a new country with some fringe members leaving).

It might not be in 5 or 10 years but it's inevitable. It's not going to operate like this for 50, 100 years.

Just run a mental simulation of WW2 playing out except Europe had the EU.

So while I agree the EU is becoming more an more normal and important to the average citizen, there will come a time when it has to either solidify further or break apart, and I think it's basically a crapshoot to predict how that will go now when we have basically zero info.

> Additionally, we've now seen the EU survive the departure of a major economic power (the UK).

I don’t really understand the impact of Brexit on the euro, as Britain wasn’t on it. But clearly they were a key part of the EU. It’ll be interesting to see which side regrets the move more.

The Yuan is not a freely convertible currency, so not really an option here. The Euro isn't terrible, but it has structural issues in that member states all must take out debt in what is for monetary policy purposes a foreign currency. This generated a debt crisis 10 years ago, which has been papered over, but the structural issues remain unresolved. Also, the Euro has been around now for 25 years. That's not long enough to convince anyone of long term stability.

And to add on (rather than edit my comment), I think the saving grace that keeps USD around for a while longer is the last section of the article, "Deposit dollarization in emerging markets"

A lot of growing economies don't/can't trust their local currency and they overwhelmingly use USD instead of EUR or CNY. As those economies grow the USD gets a boost that will sustain it for a while over the increasing competition of CNY. But this can't sustain it forever and the US is not doing anything to offset the lost ground in global trade and forex reserves.

> Another major currency is the Yuan

Is it? CNY seems to be about the same as CHF:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Most_traded_currencie...

In a similar range as AUD and CAD.

The UK was not part of the Euro economy.

Saudi Arabia was privately discussing de-dollarization way back in summer last year, when the irrational tariffs were imposed, followed by the Israeli-US strikes on Iran. Make of that what you will.