The dollar suddenly became something like an IOU issued by the hegemon. Before long, the global financial system was backed by IOUs issued by a hegem… - Yanis Varoufakis

A Chinese official once described to me globalization as something that was founded on a "dark deal" – that's how the Chinese official put it to me: a dark deal.

America was now a fully fledged deficit country, with a big trade deficit. But it was nothing like any other deficit country in the world. You see, Argentina, France, India, Greece needed to borrow dollars. America didn't need to borrow dollars to back up its currency. It didn't need to raise interests rates in order to prevent an exodus of dollars. The exodus of dollars was the foundation of American hegemony.

What did they understand better than we did? They understood better than we did the new, audacious imperialism that was born in 1971, when Bretton Woods collapsed, and the United States dollar was no longer convertible to gold, prompting [President] Richard Nixon to send a message to Europeans, European governments, and the world's capitalists, saying: "The dollar, as of today, is your problem".