While the United States markets its society through democracy, it markets its economy through the dollar. The cliched American values of liberty and freedom mean nothing unless they are backed by the equally cliched Great American Dream, made possible thanks to the greenback. The US Dollar is not just their brand ambassador, it is one of the most important brand elements of the US. It is also a brand on its own, and a way to measure the brand equity of the USA.
The US did not invent the dollar. The word dollar was already used for money in Old World Europe. Both Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Tempest contain the word dollar, and they were first performed in 1611, even before the Pilgrim Fathers set sail for America in 1620. The word ‘thaler’ went through European languages, and arrived as ‘dollar’ in English. Due to the large scale availability of the Spanish dollar, and a shortage of official British coins, the US adopted the ‘dollar’ as its currency. This was a turning point for the pound and its future.
The dollar was just another currency till World War I hit Europe. While European currencies, including the pound, became unstable and empires went off the maps, the dollar rose along with the US. The Great Depression did cause problems, but Hitler stepped in with World War II, leading to the great American boom while Britain and the rest of Europe shattered. Post Word War II, all the rebuilding was driven by the USA; they dominated global trade, all the international agencies were set up by them, mostly headquartered in the US, and the currency of choice became the dollar.
An imploding British Empire lost India, and other colonies. Even once autonomously happy states under it gained independence and switched over from the pound to the Canadian dollar, the Australian dollar, the Hong Kong dollar, the Singapore dollar and the New Zealand dollar. Not a pound in sight. The dollar was the name of choice for your currency. It was simpler to use too. The division was in cents, versus the cumbersome division of the pound into shillings and pence. The once strong pound that wielded its weight in gold would recede to the boundaries of Great Britain as did the Empire it represented. And the USA and its dollar would step to the forefront to fill the void that it had created.
Despite its break from the gold standard in 1971, the strength of the dollar would be reinforced by the events in the 1980s that led to the eventual downfall of the USSR, making the ruble into rubble, and making USA the only true superpower, an economic one. Its brand of money and weapon of choice: the dollar.
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[...] it represents for the US is diminishing. This somehow seems quite similar to the events surrounding the decline of the British Empire and its pound. Could history be repeating [...]