Every day, $9.6 trillion changes hands in global foreign exchange markets. The world consumes roughly 102–103 million barrels of oil a day — worth about $10 billion at a forecast for the 2026 average Brent price of around $96 a barrel. Daily currency trading is, in other words, nearly a thousand times larger than the value of all the oil the world burns in a day. The comparison needs a caveat: the dollar is not a commodity in the same category as oil or wheat. A currency used to settle commodity trade operates at a different order of magnitude from the commodities it prices, so setting the two figures side by side is close to absurd. Working out why shows where power sits in the plumbing of global finance, and where the US dollar’s position is strong and where it is exposed.
The Commodity Leaderboard and Its Limits
The question of which commodity is most traded depends on what kind of trading you measure. Physical volume, counted in tonnes, barrels, cubic metres or bushels, produces one answer. Financial contract volume, measured in notional value of futures and spot transactions, produces another, and the two have little in common.
Crude oil is the heavyweight of the energy complex. Global consumption of petroleum and other liquid fuels runs at roughly 102–103 million barrels per day, and that demand drives a corresponding volume of physical trade across tanker routes, pipelines, and storage infrastructure. Natural gas is the second great energy commodity, but its market is structurally different: pipeline infrastructure fragments gas pricing across regional benchmark prices (European TTF, US Henry Hub, Asian JKM) rather than converging on a single global one. That fragmentation limits its comparability to oil and makes its “trading volume” harder to aggregate meaningfully at a global scale.
Agricultural commodities such as wheat, soybeans and corn are enormous by physical tonnage and support some of the world’s most liquid futures markets. Coffee is a high-value agricultural export but is small relative to the grains. None of these, individually or combined, approaches the scale of the oil trade by financial volume.
Foreign exchange is in a different league again. In April 2025 its daily turnover reached $9.6 trillion, many times the annual value of the global wheat trade (roughly $50 billion) or of coffee bean exports (about $34 billion in 2024). By the measure of daily financial transaction volume, currencies, and specifically the US dollar, are not in the same category as any physical commodity.
The obvious objection is that calling a currency a “commodity” is a category error. In everyday use, “commodity” has come to mean physical stuff — something grown, extracted, or refined. Economists use the term more broadly, for any standardised, interchangeable good, but even that usage typically preserves the sense of materiality. Currency, by contrast, is issued and managed, and what its holder owns is a claim.
What makes something a commodity?
In economics, a commodity is any standardised, fungible good, meaning one unit is interchangeable with another of the same grade. By that definition, currencies qualify: a dollar is a dollar, and the foreign exchange market is, in structural terms, a commodity market for national currencies. Traders, for their part, treat major currencies exactly like other liquid commodities: they are bought, sold, stored, and hedged using the same instruments (futures, options, swaps) that apply to oil or wheat.
The boundary is worth drawing because the popular assumption that the "most traded commodity" must be a physical thing hides how the global economy works. A system built on financial claims cannot be measured in tonnes.Why the Dollar Wins
In April 2025 the US dollar appeared on one side of 89.2% of all over-the-counter FX transactions, the trades banks and dealers arrange directly with each other rather than on an exchange. That was up from 88.4% in 2022, so its share is still rising. Because every trade involves two currencies, the shares of all currencies add up to 200%; the maximum possible share for any single currency is 100%. The euro, the second most traded currency, appeared in 28.9% of trades.
Those are remarkable figures for a country whose GDP is roughly a quarter of global output. Market preference, in any simple sense, does not explain them. They reflect the structure of the global trade system, specifically the convention of invoicing international trade in dollars regardless of whether the United States is a party to the transaction.
Export invoicing, meaning the currency in which cross-border trade contracts are denominated, shows how far that convention reaches. Between 1999 and 2019, 96% of trade was invoiced in dollars across the Americas, 74% in Asia-Pacific and 79% in the rest of the world outside Europe, the one region where the euro leads, and no subsequent data has overturned the pattern. A Japanese company buying Malaysian palm oil typically does not transact in yen or ringgit. The contract is written in dollars, the payment is made in dollars, and somewhere in that chain a foreign exchange transaction converts one national currency into dollars, and eventually dollars into another. That FX transaction is what the daily turnover figure counts.
The $9.6 trillion is less a cause of dollar supremacy than a symptom of it. Most of that turnover is banks and funds dealing with each other rather than exporters settling invoices, but they deal in dollars because dollars are what trade, debt and reserves are written in. Seen this way, the scale is less surprising: the market is this large because of decisions, taken decades ago, about how global trade would be priced.
The Architecture of Dependence
Size mattered, but the dollar did not become the world’s settlement currency simply because the United States was the largest economy, or through market preference alone. The postwar monetary order was built on purpose, around the dollar.
At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, the United States, at that point the world’s largest creditor nation and the holder of the majority of global gold reserves, secured an arrangement that made the dollar the anchor of the international monetary system. Other currencies were pegged to the dollar; the dollar was convertible to gold at $35 per ounce. The International Monetary Fund was set up to oversee the system, alongside a World Bank to finance reconstruction. Under the Bretton Woods system, the dollar was the unit in which international obligations were settled and in which exchange rates were expressed.
When Richard Nixon suspended dollar-gold convertibility in August 1971, and the fixed exchange rates of Bretton Woods gave way over the following two years, the dollar did not lose its central position. By 1971, the global financial system was organised around something larger than the Bretton Woods rules: the eurodollar market. Dollar-denominated deposits held outside the United States had grown steadily through the 1950s and 1960s, creating a vast pool of dollar liquidity beyond any government’s direct control. US Treasury markets offered depth, liquidity, and legal predictability that no alternative could match.
The dollar’s position after Bretton Woods was, if anything, less constrained: no longer bound by the obligation to convert dollars to gold, the US could run deficits without the discipline that gold convertibility had theoretically imposed. That pre-existing dollar centrality is the foundation on which what came next was built.
In 1974, in the aftermath of the OPEC oil embargo, Washington and Riyadh built a bilateral political arrangement. In June, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Prince Fahd, then second deputy prime minister and interior minister, launched a US–Saudi Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation; in July, Treasury Secretary William Simon travelled to Saudi Arabia and secured a confidential deal under which the kingdom would recycle its surplus oil revenues into US Treasury securities. The arrangement was never formalised as a treaty, and no document obliged Saudi Arabia to sell its oil for dollars. The kingdom kept invoicing in the currency its oil industry had always used, pricing its oil exports in dollars and recycling surplus dollar revenues into US Treasury bonds and dollar-denominated financial assets. The United States provided security guarantees, military equipment, and political backing. OPEC as a body never signed a formal commitment to price oil in dollars; the convention held across the cartel and, through network effects, reinforced dollar pricing in other commodity markets. Once the world’s largest energy commodity was universally priced in dollars, denominating other commodities in other currencies carried a cost that few markets chose to pay, though some do: Europe’s gas benchmark is quoted in euros.
How petrodollar recycling works
The petrodollar feedback loop operates as follows. Oil-exporting countries earn dollar revenues from sales priced in dollars. Those revenues accumulate as dollar surpluses that must be invested somewhere. Since the mid-1970s, a significant portion of those surpluses has flowed into US Treasury bonds and US financial assets, a process economists call petrodollar recycling. The consequence is structural. Oil exporters help finance US government borrowing, which holds down US interest rates and deepens the Treasury market that other investors rely on for safety and liquidity. That depth sustains global demand for dollars, and with it the invoicing convention that generates the surplus in the first place.
The arrangement also subsidises the US ability to run persistent trade deficits, since other countries need dollars to buy oil and to hold as reserves, and accept them even though nothing obliges them to. Because the original arrangement was bilateral, informal and dependent on US security credibility, it is not written in treaty language and does not require renegotiation, but its durability depends on the United States maintaining the security commitments and financial credibility that make it worth sustaining.Because oil is an input cost for almost every manufactured good, the dollar’s position in energy pricing cascades outward. A manufacturer in Vietnam buying Indonesian crude, a shipping company in Greece paying for fuel, a fertiliser producer in Brazil purchasing natural gas feedstock — all of these transactions are conducted in dollars or denominated against dollar benchmarks. The currency reaches deep into supply chains that have no direct connection to the United States.
Understanding why oil is priced in dollars is not the same as understanding how those dollars change hands.
The Plumbing: Correspondent Banking and SWIFT
International payments do not move through a direct channel between payer and recipient. Most banks, including most large banks outside the United States, do not maintain direct bilateral relationships with banks in every other jurisdiction. They process cross-border payments through correspondent banks: larger institutions, typically US-regulated, that hold accounts on behalf of their foreign counterparts and process transactions through those accounts.
Almost every bank that clears US dollars does so, directly or through a chain of intermediaries, across an account at a US-regulated institution. As a result, US banking regulators, and through them US law enforcement and sanctions authorities, have de facto jurisdiction over most international transactions denominated in dollars, regardless of whether any US party is involved. A trade between a Singaporean company and a South African one, invoiced in dollars and settled through a correspondent bank in New York, passes under US regulatory oversight although neither company is based in the US.
SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is the messaging network through which more than 11,500 financial institutions in over 200 countries and territories send the payment instructions behind international transfers. In January 2025 the dollar’s share of payments sent over SWIFT, by value, rose just above 50%, at the time its highest since SWIFT changed how it collects the data in mid-2023, and by the summer of 2026 it was still at roughly half or slightly more. SWIFT is not exclusively dollar infrastructure: transactions in euros, sterling, yen, and other currencies all flow through it. But the dollar’s share of SWIFT traffic reflects and reinforces the correspondent banking structure that makes dollar clearing mandatory for so many international transactions.
The source of dollar power sits one level below SWIFT, in the correspondent banking architecture that gives US regulators reach into almost any dollar transaction anywhere in the world. SWIFT transmits that power and makes the architecture legible and interconnected; the leverage itself operates at the level of clearing.
Russia, SWIFT, and the cost of exclusion
In March 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the European Union, acting in coordination with the United States and the United Kingdom, ordered seven Russian banks off the SWIFT messaging network: VTB Bank, Vnesheconombank, Rossiya Bank, Sovcombank, Bank Otkritie, Novikombank, and Promsvyazbank. Sberbank, Russia's largest, was initially exempted to preserve EU energy payment flows and was removed in a subsequent round of sanctions roughly three months later. The immediate effect was significant: Russian institutions lost access to the standard infrastructure for international payments, complicating trade finance, correspondent banking, and foreign exchange transactions.
The longer-term effect has been more complicated. Russia accelerated its use of SPFS, its domestic financial messaging system, and expanded bilateral settlement arrangements with China, India, and other trading partners. China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), already operational, became a more attractive alternative infrastructure for non-Western institutions seeking to reduce SWIFT exposure. The mBridge project, at the time still under BIS innovation hub auspices, moved further up development agendas. The 2022 exclusion showed the reach of SWIFT-linked dollar infrastructure and also its specific vulnerability: the very power of exclusion as a foreign policy tool gives other actors a concrete incentive to build alternatives. That incentive is already speeding the construction of parallel systems, which reduce dependence on the dollar at the margin without displacing the dollar system.The correspondent banking structure makes dollar dominance operationally entrenched. Alternatives are not literally impossible, but building credible ones requires years of investment, regulatory coordination, and liquidity provision that cannot be shortcut by political declaration. The advantages the United States draws from that entrenchment have had a name since the 1960s.
The Exorbitant Privilege
The phrase was coined by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, serving as French Finance Minister in the mid-1960s, and it named something specific: the ability of the United States to accumulate foreign debt in a currency it alone could issue. It is frequently attributed to Charles de Gaulle, who was certainly its most theatrical critic. At a press conference on February 4, 1965, de Gaulle made the complaint formal: the United States could be indebted to the world effectively free of charge, running deficits covered in dollars that other countries were obliged to hold. In his telling, the issuer of the reserve currency enjoyed the privilege and everyone else paid for it.
The privilege has three concrete dimensions, and they work as one self-reinforcing system that Giscard’s phrase compressed into a single grievance.
Central banks worldwide hold dollars as reserves; the dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves stood at 56.7% in mid-2026. That reserve demand creates structural demand for US government debt, because foreign central banks accumulate dollars primarily by purchasing US Treasury bonds, and it subsidises US borrowing costs. Lower borrowing costs help pay for the military and political commitments behind the security guarantees on which the petrodollar arrangement rests, and so feed back into the invoicing convention and reserve demand. Incumbency protects that position less than is commonly assumed, since the dollar and sterling shared the role in the 1920s, and it endures only as long as the United States keeps its fiscal and financial house in order.
The second dimension is the ability to run persistent current account deficits without triggering a balance-of-payments crisis. Other countries must earn foreign currency to pay for imports; a country running a deficit must at some point correct it, either through depreciation or through adjustment of domestic demand. The United States pays for imports in dollars, and other countries need those dollars to settle oil contracts, to service external debt and to hold as reserves. The US turns this into income: it borrows short-term in dollars and invests long-term in riskier foreign assets, earning a persistent excess return. The other side of the bargain is that in global crises the United States absorbs large valuation losses, so the excess return works like an insurance premium the rest of the world pays.
The third dimension is sanctions power. Dollar infrastructure gives the United States the ability to impose financial isolation on adversaries at relatively low direct cost to itself. For a country deeply integrated into dollar trade flows, exclusion from dollar clearing, or from SWIFT when its European overseers act alongside Washington, can be economically severe, and no other currency issuer holds comparable leverage.
The critique has a domestic version too. The privilege accrues primarily to the US financial sector and to the government’s borrowing capacity. Its costs, in the form of chronic current account deficits, suppressed export competitiveness and hollowed manufacturing sectors, fall disproportionately on American workers in traded industries. Dollar dominance reinforces the conditions under which persistent deficits are easier to sustain — though the causal relationship between reserve currency status and manufacturing decline is contested, and technological change, labour market institutions, and trade policy all carry substantial independent weight. The political backlash against those structural consequences is now a durable feature of American politics, and it shapes the domestic sustainability of the privilege in ways that geopolitical rivalry does not.
The Genuine Threats, and the False Ones
The loudest claims about dollar displacement come from geopolitical declarations: BRICS summits announcing de-dollarization agendas, discussions of a petroyuan, Chinese and Russian officials announcing the imminent end of dollar hegemony. These claims do not survive contact with the plumbing: dollar dominance may not be permanent, but it rests on infrastructure that declarations cannot replace.
The yuan’s position in the international financial system illustrates the gap. In mid-2026 the yuan made up about 2% of global foreign exchange reserves and about 3% of global payments by value over SWIFT, fifth among currencies and down from about 4.5% in mid-2024. Neither figure suggests a currency on the verge of displacing the dollar. The structural constraint is convertibility. China maintains capital controls that prevent the free movement of yuan across borders that a reserve currency on the dollar’s scale requires. Foreign central banks and financial institutions want to hold, move and deploy a reserve asset with as few restrictions as possible, and the yuan currently falls well short of that. Capital account liberalisation is technically feasible, so the condition need not be permanent, but it is a real constraint that BRICS communiqués do not address, and lifting it requires policy choices that carry substantial domestic costs.
Most of what is happening is de-risking rather than de-dollarization. Countries are reducing their exposure to dollar infrastructure by diversifying foreign exchange reserves, expanding bilateral settlement agreements and investing in alternative payment systems, without having a viable substitute. These are hedges, and added up they dilute the dollar’s role without replacing it.
Reserve diversification is the most gradual and least dramatic of the genuine threats. The dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has declined from about 71.5% in 2001 to 56.7% in mid-2026. The decline is slow and non-linear, with years of stability and even partial reversal, but the direction is consistent over a quarter-century. A fall of about fifteen percentage points represents a structural shift in the composition of central bank portfolios. The dollar remains dominant, but its dominance is contracting at the margin, and that contraction does not require a successor.
More disruptive in the long run, if slower to materialise, is the construction of alternative payment infrastructure. China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) is operational and growing. The mBridge project, a multi-currency cross-border payment platform developed under BIS auspices, reached minimum viable product stage in mid-2024, and in October 2024 the Bank for International Settlements handed it over to the participating central banks and monetary authorities of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, whose central bank had joined as a full participant earlier in 2024. Saudi Arabia ended its participation after completing a proof of concept in May 2025, a withdrawal that became public only in September 2026. The Monetary Authority of Macao joined earlier in 2026 and switched the system on for Macao’s banks on 2 June. By late 2025, mBridge had processed about $55 billion in cumulative transaction volume, around 95% of it settled in China’s digital yuan. That volume is small against SWIFT’s daily traffic; what matters is whether it keeps growing.
CIPS and mBridge: the alternative plumbing
CIPS, China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, launched in 2015 as a yuan-denominated correspondent banking and settlement system. It is designed to let international institutions clear and settle yuan payments outside dollar correspondent banking chains, although most CIPS payments still travel over SWIFT messaging. By the end of 2025, CIPS had almost 1,800 participants, most of them indirect, in 124 countries and regions. Its transaction volumes remain a fraction of SWIFT's, but CIPS is growing, particularly in trade corridors between China and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Africa.
mBridge is a different type of project: a multi-central-bank digital currency platform designed to let participating commercial banks settle cross-border payments directly in central bank digital currencies, bypassing correspondent banking entirely. Developed initially under the BIS Innovation Hub, it is now run by the central banks and monetary authorities of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE, and Macao. Its roughly $55 billion in transactions by late 2025 represents proof of concept at minimum viable scale. Neither CIPS nor mBridge represents an imminent replacement for SWIFT; both represent serious infrastructure investments that reduce the technical barriers to non-dollar settlement at the margin.The least visible and most proximate threat is domestic. The privilege has come with persistent current account deficits, as the United States absorbs the world’s dollar savings in exchange for Treasury bonds and financial assets, and the costs Americans attach to that bargain now run through national politics. Sustaining the privilege requires a political willingness to keep capital accounts open, Treasury markets deep and international commitments funded. That willingness is not guaranteed, and its erosion from within is a more proximate threat than any external rival’s currency.
The threats that matter, then, are internal and incremental: the political sustainability of the costs the privilege imposes at home, and the slow, largely invisible construction of alternative infrastructure by actors with concrete incentives to reduce their dependence on a system they cannot control.
Dilution
On its own, $9.6 trillion a day is just a large number, one that makes crude oil look modest and the dollar look anomalous. The mechanisms that built it were visible and deliberate: a conference at Bretton Woods, the 1974 bargains negotiated by Henry Kissinger and William Simon, a clearing system that routes the world’s dollars through New York. Those that will erode it are harder to see: a slow decline in reserve share, a growing CIPS participant list, a digital platform whose volumes are still small, a domestic political coalition that has decided the costs of the privilege are not worth bearing.
None of these developments is a displacement event. Their combined effect is dilution, a gradual diversification of the plumbing beneath the dollar. The dollar’s share in the next survey of currency trading may barely move while the architecture beneath it keeps changing.
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