Our Dollar, Your Problem — Bloomberg Surveillance discusses Rogoff's book

The conversation that began at an event hosted by London Business School’s Wheeler Institute did not end in the lecture theatre. It carried straight onto Bloomberg Surveillance, where Tom Keene and Paul Sweeney picked up the themes of Ken Rogoff’s Our Dollar, Your Problem and his on-stage exchange with LBS Professor Hélène Rey, pressing them forward through the lens of global markets and investor behaviour.

At the heart of the discussion was a question that animated the Wheeler symposium: is the world quietly, unevenly moving away from dollar dominance toward a more fragmented, multipolar financial system? Dr Vania Stavrakeva, Assistant Professor of Economics at London Business School and a participant in the event, framed the answer with care. The transition, she noted, is neither abrupt nor clean. Dollar centrality has deep roots in trade, finance, and institutions, and history suggests such shifts unfold over decades rather than quarters.

Yet the pressures are unmistakable. Trade tensions and tariffs are no longer just about goods crossing borders. They reshape capital flows, alliances, and the synchronisation of business cycles. As countries reorient trade toward new partners, the financial counterpart, cross-border borrowing and investment, inevitably follows. The result is a world where economic cycles are becoming less correlated, and where the dollar’s influence, while still dominant, is no longer uncontested.

That complexity showed up vividly in the programme’s turn to digital finance. Recent tremors in stablecoins, an area Rogoff has warned about extensively, offered a timely stress test. Stavrakeva underscored the central tension: stablecoins promise safety by backing themselves with supposedly safe assets, yet operate in a regulatory grey zone that leaves investors guessing about capitalisation, transparency, and true market value. In moments of stress, that uncertainty matters.

At the same time, the conversation resisted any easy narrative of US decline. Stavrakeva pointed to a striking shift in the mechanics of global capital flows, drawing on research with Hélène Rey. Where once US Treasuries and fixed income dominated foreign demand for dollars, equity flows now play a far larger role. Dollar strength increasingly reflects global investors buying into US technology and AI-driven growth rather than seeking refuge in government debt.

This creates a more unstable equilibrium. Political uncertainty and inflation fears can weaken the dollar through fixed income channels, even as equity optimism pushes it higher. The net effect is a currency pulled in opposing directions, a marked contrast to the post-financial-crisis era when central bank policy largely dictated outcomes.

For Bloomberg Surveillance, the discussion captured what made the Wheeler Institute event resonate so strongly: not a proclamation of the dollar’s end, but a sharper understanding of how its role is changing. As Rogoff’s book and Rey’s research both suggest, the dollar remains central, but the forces shaping it are multiplying, and the rules investors once relied on are no longer singular or simple.

Watch the full interview here