There's a 'stealth erosion' in global US dollar reserves, but there's no dominant replacement yet
The US dollar's share in global forex reserves dropped to 55% from over 70% in 2000, per IMF data.
Non-traditional reserve currencies such as the Australian dollar and Canadian dollar are gaining ground.
The world's central banks have been cutting the share of US dollars in their foreign reserves for the last two decades.
The US dollar is in a state of "stealth erosion," the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, wrote in a report on Tuesday.
While the dollar is still by far the most dominant currency in the forex reserves of the world's central banks, the greenback's share in these reserves — after exchange-rate and interest-rate adjustments — declined from over 70% in 2000 to about 55% in the last quarter of 2023, according to IMF's data.
The dollar has been strengthening against most currencies in recent years — indicating that private investors have moved into dollar-based assets. This effect masked the shift of central banks and governments out of dollar reserves.
The Dollar Index, which measures the value of the greenback against a basket of foreign currencies, has gained 4% this year to date and about 7% since March 2022, when the US Federal Reserve started its last interest-rate hike cycle.
Central banks have been 'shifting gradually' away from the USD
The dollar's share hasn't been overtaken by the world's other three major currencies — the euro, the Japanese yen, or the UK pound sterling.
Instead, the shares of "non-traditional reserve currencies" have risen, according to the IMF. These include the Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, Chinese renminbi, South Korean won, Singaporean dollar, and Nordic currencies.
The IMF's findings are consistent with its previous report in 2022 when it found that the dollar's dominance was waning and getting replaced with alternative currencies.
"These nontraditional reserve currencies are attractive to reserve managers because they provide diversification and relatively attractive yields, and because they have become increasingly easy to buy, sell and hold with the development of new digital financial technologies," wrote IMF's economists in their latest report, which is based on data from 149 reporting economies that collectively account for 93% of global forex reserves.
The dollar's decline in FX reserves doesn't appear to be about sanctions
The IMF's report comes amid ongoing discussions about de-dollarization.
With the use of sanctions, the West effectively shut Russia out of the global, greenback-based financial system after Moscow started the war in Ukraine.
Other countries are now concerned that they, too, could be locked out of the US dollar-based financial system.
However, the slow waning of the dollar's dominance in global forex reserves appears to be less about trade restrictions than diversification — because its decline has not accelerated in recent years despite the US' intensifying use of financial sanctions.
Even so, there are other concerns that may erode confidence in the greenback, analysts have said recently.
On Monday, two American think tank analysts wrote in the Financial Times that "American dysfunction" — political and fiscal — is the real threat to dollar dominance. This sentiment was also echoed by Jared Cohen, the president of global affairs at Goldman Sachs, in Foreign Policy.
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