Bretton

>>"People will work, sell, panhandle, lie, cheat, steal, and even kill to obtain the government's dollars. I wish my IOUs were so desirable."

The dollar's hold over the top spot among international reserve currencies is not earned through worldwide affection for the dollar, but through worldwide intimidation by the dollar's issuers. A lot of people outside of America are scornful of what America has done with Bretton Woods in the post-WWII world. The trillions of loan-backed fiat dollars force-fed into the global economy to pay for our gluttonous appetite for imports ( like oil ) equate to a form of asset seizure through currency manipulation. Our trading partners remain bound to the dollar because the international financial establishment has made them 'an offer they can't refuse'.

This hegemony of the dollar comes from military threat and ongoing destabilization of any foreign country that attempts to conduct oil business without the dollar. Bombs and missiles circling oil supplies are the backbone of the dollar's enduring convertibility. It floats on threats, extortion, bribery, espionage, and assassinations, not on international enthusiasm for America's policies.

Your neighborhood grocery would take whatever debt-backed fiat currency you offered them, too, if you surrounded their store with tanks, aircraft carriers, and ICBM's, and they would recycle the paper that stuffed their cash register back into the debt of their most powerful customer, because they just wouldn't see a way out of the arrangement that didn't fix a crosshairs on their forehead.