The day after President Biden announced his run for a second term, one of Donald Trump’s responses was: “The dollar will soon no longer be the world standard, which will be our greatest defeat in over 200 years.”

When I searched for the source of this alarming prediction, the first to come up was a precious metals/cryptocurrency website. There are still people (most famously libertarian Ron Paul) who still believe in the gold standard, and the principal goal of the crypto people is to replace the dollar.

Economist Paul Krugman believes that these fears are way overblown, but, just for an exercise, he wants us to consider the case of Britain. For more than 200 years the British pound ruled the financial world until 1949. Until then one would have paid about $5 for £1, but now it costs $1.26. The dollar is now at its highest level against all major currencies since 2014