How Big Are We?

In recent noise about the financial world, much has been made of the relative weakness of the U.S. dollar. A lot of seemingly knowledgeable commentators like to predict that international investors either are already or will soon start to run away from the dollar into some other (not yet existing) international monetary unit.

This graph shows one reason why a move away from the dollar is almost impossible unless we're talking in decades instead of years.

Here's the original link at the Atlantic if you want more detail. One quick takeaway is that the metropolitan New York area has an economy larger than that of Canada. The Los Angeles area economy is almost as large as that of the Netherlands.

When American cities have economies as large as major nations this means that the dollar cannot be replaced as an international monetary exchange in the near term. The entire world simply cannot replace the dollar with Swiss Francs when Chicago, all by itself, is bigger than Switzerland. It's a question of liquidity.