That's the split between George Gammon and Philip Pilkington, debating whether the dollar survives as reserve currency.
Gammon's case: forget central bank balance sheets. Look at what the world actually transacts in.
Nearly 90% of global FX trades still touch dollars, and that's rising, not falling, even after 2022's asset freezes.
His analogy: the dollar isn't a currency, it's a financial system, swaps, corporate paper markets, hedging tools, the smartphone next to everyone else's flip phone. Even hostile governments' companies default to dollars because the alternative infrastructure doesn't exist yet.
Pilkington's counter: none of that is permanent, it's a residual.
Sterling looked exactly this dominant in 1931, 63% of world reserves, and collapsed to a minority currency within sixteen years.
What actually drives usage, he argues, is interest rate spread: cheap dollar borrowing built the network effect, and that engine just switched off.
10-year Treasuries at 4.75% against China's 1.67% means the arbitrage that made dollar debt attractive now runs backward. And JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank issuing panda bonds is the first crack.
The disagreement sharpens over what's replacing Treasuries on America's balance sheet.
Pilkington's flag: for the first time in the dollar era, the U.S. is settling its trade deficit by exporting equities instead of debt.
A structural shift he says has never existed before, and one that turns any AI-bubble correction into a currency event, not just a stock one.
Neither budges on the endgame.
Gammon: multilateral fragmentation is a productivity downgrade the world won't accept, the same way nobody reverts to a thousand competing languages.
Pilkington: the alternative isn't fragmentation, it's a 2-to-4-year window where trust breaks the way it broke for Britain. Fast, and mostly after the fact.
So, is the dollar's edge structural, or just the last currency standing before the next transition?
@GeorgeGammon @philippilk
