The dollar is not going anywhere. What is changing is the plumbing underneath it — the swap lines, the settlement rails, and the quiet bilateral agreements that decide where liquidity actually pools during a stress window.
What the telemetry shows
Cross-border settlement volumes through non-USD rails have grown for eleven consecutive quarters. That is not a headline. What is a headline is that during the last two liquidity events, the marginal buyer of dollars was not who the textbooks would predict.
"Reserve currencies do not die. They fragment. And fragmentation is a tradeable phenomenon."— N. Petrova, COO
What we are watching in H2
- EUR/USD basis swap normalisation after ECB balance-sheet actions
- USD/CNH offshore liquidity during Asian holiday windows
- Gold as a shadow settlement asset in emerging-market blocks