The Trade Deficit and the Dollar

   In the May/June issue of Dollars & Sense,  you can find a magnificent article by Katherine Sciacchitano entitled W(h)ITHER the DOLLAR.  It concerns the U.S. trade deficit,  the global economic crisis, and the Dollar's status as the world's reserve currency.
    Ms. Sciacchitano explains, in eight pages, how the United States failure to accept a "world currency" at the Breton Woods conference in 1948 has doomed us to our current status as a debtor nation.  Our insistence on using the Dollar as the world's reserve currency has also caused the de-industrialization of America, the reduction of the American industrial working class to poverty, and the virtual enslavement of most third world countries to the whims of international capital.
  I won't attempt to summarize this article, since the article itself basically summarizes the entire course of political, economic, and military relationships of the Western World since 1948, both within nations and between nations. What most authors would attempt in some 800 page magnum opus, she neatly does in 8 pages.  But this is absolutely the best explanation you're going to find on this subject.