The dollar’s reserve status yields leverage – at hidden cost. An economic reckoning reveals the trade-offs embedded in monetary dominance. In some corners of the political imagination, the dollar has become a grand theory of everything – not a currency, but a convenient, catch-all, virtually cosmic culprit. Every sanction, every covert operation, every warship dispatched toward some far-off horizon is traced back to a single, hidden animating force : the need to defend the world’s monetary