onlooker wrote:"The dollars' decline is inevitable but a sudden collapse is indeed undesirable!
However, its speed of decline could be more accelerated than some believe because of the very instrument the US had used to anchor the dollar as a reserved currency, namely OPEC!
With most of Saudi's oil being bought by China and little by an internally energy sufficient US, the Saudis could change to accepting Yuan instead of the dollar! The other Gulf states, to capture part of China's increasing larger volume of energy purchases would follow suit.
Russia, soon the largest gas and oil supplier to China has already done!
This would diminish the US dollar quickly although it may or may not cause it's collapse!
The latter depends on whether China engages in mutual sanctions with a US initiated one!
Without cheap and good Chinese consumer products, US inflation would jump hundreds of per cent. It could rapidly lead to the collapse of not only the US dollar but the US economy itself.
To China, the US trade is big but getting less significant!"
Once again, the whole "reserve currency" thing is greatly overblown.
There are huge, liquid, currency futures markets. Countries, oil producers, and oil consumers can easily hold or hedge their dollar holdings in whatever currency they like instead of dollars. (That't roughly $5 trillion per trading day of typical liquidity).
(Then if need be, for the reserve currency "books", they can nominally hold the dollars they need to purchase the oil for a second, or a minute if need be, and the whole "dollar reserve currency" requirement is taken care of).
Countries are also discussing arrangements to trade oil directly using currencies such as "regional" currencies, where the dollar doesn't even play a part on the books, as you refer to (with a great sense of FUD).
This is all well known by people who actually know something about economics, including the major oil producers, consumers, and the folks who manage national economic policies. Has the dollar dramatically fallen in response? Nope. Has it fallen at all in response? If it has, it's not enough to tell.
You need to work on some other fable for collapse, like pumping the various ETP threads. (No more valid, but you get to use big words like "thermodynamics".)