The dollar’s role in commodity pricing kept it dominant after Bretton Woods collapsed.

Evidence

Shortly after the dollar was decoupled from gold, Europe’s currencies were decoupled from the dollar. Once they lost their fixed exchange with the dollar, the dollar value of European and Japanese money began fluctuating wildly, like driftwood in a tempestuous ocean. The dollar became the only safe harbour, courtesy of its exorbitant privilege: namely, that if any French, Japanese or Indonesian company, indeed anyone, wanted to import oil, copper, steel or even just space on a freight ship, they had to pay in dollars. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 196

Categorization

• DEFINE: This effectively defines ‘exorbitant privilege’ — the dollar’s reserve status resting on commodities being dollar-denominated.
• XREF: connects to: Vietnam and Great Society spending cost America its trade surplus and killed Bretton Woods — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 172