The Dollar's Death In 2026 Is Now A Mainstream Talking Point

Has the time finally come?

I’ve been warning about the dollar’s eventual decline for some time now. Back in 2023, in my piece U.S. Dollar “Fear Mongers” Only Need To Be Right Once, I wrote that “optimists about the U.S. economy and the dollar’s global reserve status have had the wind at their back for half of a century,” and that this very success had made it almost impossible for people to seriously consider alternative outcomes.

I compared the United States to a gambler on the greatest hot streak in history, drunk on decades of winnings, blind to the reality that when you’re betting everything on every hand, you only have to be wrong once to give it all back.

Since that time, I’ve been tracking four developments in particular that continue to reinforce that warning: the accelerating de-dollarization efforts between Russia and China, the open challenge to the dollar being mounted by the BRICS bloc, the increasingly destructive nature of U.S. monetary policy, and the relentless rise in gold and silver prices, a market signal that confidence in the dollar’s long-term purchasing power is quietly eroding. Even the Swiss franc, long viewed as one of the world’s hardest currencies, has recently pushed to highs against the dollar, another subtle but important message from the market.

At the time I first laid this out, the argument was dismissed by many as fringe (hence the name of my blog, which came from a reader comment), overly pessimistic, even conspiratorial. But now that narrative is no longer confined to the margins. It’s moving steadily into the mainstream. A recent piece in WIRED makes that clear.

WIRED argues that 2026 may mark the year when what it calls “dollar dilution” truly begins to accelerate: not a dramatic collapse, but a steady erosion of the dollar’s role as the central artery of global trade and finance. The more Washington weaponizes the currency through sanctions, seizures, and financial exclusion, the more aggressively the rest of the world builds systems designed to route around it, it says.

And as my readers know damn well, this is already happening. Here’s a sampling of pieces I’ve published about it over the last 3 years:

• March 05, 2023 – “A Tsunami of Inflation”: One Interview Everyone Should Watch This Sunday – Features analysis warning that the U.S. dollar faces reserve status challenges and that BRICS and petrodollar erosion may lead to a global monetary reset.

• December 08, 2023 – Petrodollar Endgame Moves Even Closer – Highlights the UAE halting U.S. dollar oil transactions and the broader deterioration of the petrodollar system as evidence of the dollar’s weakening global role.

• June 19, 2024 – Saudi Arabia Drifts Away From Washington And The U.S. Dollar – Discusses Saudi Arabia’s increasing willingness to settle oil in non-dollar currencies and its implications for U.S. influence and dollar hegemony.

• January 12, 2024 – “All Bull Markets Run Out Of Money”: Dave Collum – While broader in focus, this piece includes commentary on runaway government debt, de-dollarization trends, and systemic risk that underpin pressure on the dollar.

• August 31, 2025 – Gold To $6,000 Next Year: Peter Schiff Exclusive – A conversation projecting further dollar weakness and dramatic gold price inflation — reflecting perceived loss of confidence in the dollar.

• November 22, 2025 – Central Bankers Disagree About Gold – Explores soaring gold prices as a potential indicator of eroding trust in the U.S. dollar and central banker acknowledgment of shifting currency confidence.

Wired now carries the torch forward, and closer to the mainstream than even. They write that America’s share of global trade has fallen from roughly one-third in 2000 to about one-quarter today. As emerging economies trade more with one another, the dollar is no longer the default medium of exchange. India and Russia now settle trade in rupees, dirhams, and yuan. China moves more than half of its trade through CIPS, its own cross-border payment network, rather than SWIFT. Brazil and Argentina, the UAE and India, and Indonesia and Malaysia are all piloting local-currency settlement systems. These are not ideological gestures. They are structural changes.

At the same time, the reserve picture is shifting. In 1999 the dollar represented 72 percent of global reserves. Today that figure is down to 58 percent and continues to slide. A reserve currency functions on confidence, and confidence is increasingly strained by ballooning U.S. fiscal deficits, a widening current-account gap, relentless money creation, and the growing use of financial infrastructure as a geopolitical weapon. What once seemed cushioned by the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” now looks increasingly fragile.

Even the foundation of the system, the U.S. Treasury market, shows cracks. There are now over $27 trillion in Treasuries circulating globally. Yet the major institutions tasked with absorbing risk and providing liquidity have not scaled their balance sheets to match. The result is a market that no longer functions reliably under stress without Federal Reserve intervention, as the March 2020 meltdown demonstrated. The world’s safest, deepest market needed emergency life support.

The real threat to the dollar is not that one rival currency suddenly replaces it. It’s that the financial plumbing itself is being rebuilt. As I’ve detailed on my blog with Andy Schectman multiple times, new settlement rails are emerging that make the dollar optional. Projects like mBridge, linking central banks in China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the UAE. BRICS Pay, allowing BRICS+ nations to transact directly in their own currencies. The next generation of stablecoins, enabling near-instant cross-border settlement without reliance on Western banking infrastructure.

China, in particular, isn’t trying to dethrone the dollar in one blow. It is building a world where the dollar is no longer required. Expect to see growing use of RMB-linked and commodity-backed stablecoins moving through Hong Kong, the Gulf, and Southeast Asia, quietly replacing dollar rails in oil, infrastructure, ports, and industrial trade.

When I wrote in 2023 that “we’ve won 1,000 spins of the roulette wheel in a row,” the point was not that collapse was imminent, but that success itself had become the greatest source of risk. The longer the streak continued, the more unimaginable it becomes that it could ever end, even though mathematically it must. The hot streak breeds leverage, complacency, and total commitment to the bet via recency bias.

This is what options trader ‘Captain Condor’ found out this month, losing his investors $50 million from implementing a Martingale system (where you keep doubling down on losses). Eventually, you finally lose ‘the big one’.

What’s striking now is the progression of awareness of the dollar’s demise.

First the “underground” Substacks and independent analysts saw it. Then the financial fringes. Then the second-tier mainstream. Now you have publications like WIRED openly discussing the end of dollar dominance. For the first time in a very long time, the idea that the dollar’s dominance may not be permanent is no longer something you only hear from the shadows. How long before the same words appear as a front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal?

And when that day comes, where will gold be trading? My guess: a lot closer to $10,000 than $4,500.

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