Susan Hayes Culleton

But we'll press pause on that.

What I want to come back to you on is something that you said about six minutes ago now, which is about the dollar as a reserve currency.

You mentioned this in the piece.

Dollars as a share of those reserves have dropped...

During the past decade, from 65% to 57% regularly on this show, I challenge the assumption about the US being the global reserve currency.

And I get the same answer every time, which is the reason it is, is not due to anything apart from the fact that most people use dollars and what would replace it.

So I would be interested in your point now in linking in the swap lines here.

Is that the only reason that the dollar is the global reserve currency today is because it simply doesn't have a competitor?

But I want to add in, not a leg at the stool, just a vulnerability in general.

And that is because so much debt is held in treasuries, which just for any listener who's wondering what that means, it means that me here today, Susan in Ireland, I can lend money to the US government.

I would do that in dollars and I would own a piece of debt that the US government would own back to me.

And the value of that market is in tens of trillions of dollars.

But since so much of that is held outside of the US...

If, again, going back to the point about going rogue or going otherwise, there is a vulnerability then that an awful lot of the control of the interest rate, namely the bond yield, is held outside the country.

And because the deficit is so big and now the amount of interest that the US is spending, the amount of money the US is spending on interest now is greater than defence or healthcare or anything else like that.

There's a massive vulnerability then in case anything was to happen intentionally or otherwise on the ability for the US to borrow.

And we started off this conversation in the United Arab Emirates.

We finished it in Washington.

Thank you very much indeed for joining me, Brendan Greeley, contributing editor with the Financial Times and author of the soon-to-be-published The Almighty Dollar, 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money.

This is Susan A. Scullerton here on Taking Stock on News Talk.