Discussing the question in Beijing with a Chinese colleague who specialises in Marxist political economy, he remarked that the quality of a currency system is ultimately defined by the class relations that underpin it. In that spirit, perhaps the best label for the current era would be the “billionaire dollar” in honour of President Donald Trump and his shameless self-enrichment. Or perhaps that should be the “trillionaire dollar” after Elon Musk and the SpaceX IPO, which has redefined the parameters of wealth. Certainly, in the current iteration of the dollar system, anyone worrying too much about America’s chronic fiscal incontinence can easily seem out of touch. We aren’t in the 1990s any more. But if that is so, perhaps it is also time to stop speaking of the dollar as a reserve currency, with all its time-honoured connotations of bank vaults, probity and solidity. America’s currency today is, above all, a promise of liquidity and a vehicle for outsized and unfettered capital accumulation: the profit dollar.

petrodollars etc dont really exist anymore. the global dollar standard has in the age of neoliberal global governance become a governance institution of the world market. the important distinction here is that it's not (just) a tool of american imperial interest (whereas in older dollar standard eras it was primarily used to get other states to act in the US interest. this still lives on, as one can see in sanctions regimes, but it's not the primary function of it anymore), in fact despite the "extraordinary privilege" the dollar standard also confers a number of liabilities to the US. like it said in the Anton Jäger piece: the neoliberal globalization has created an international bourgeoisie that isn't necessarily beholden to the traditional bourgeois powerbase of the nationstate. the result is that the US has to act as an supranational bourgeois state.