Nowadays, the U.S. only accounts for about a quarter of the global economy, but more than 57 per cent of the world’s official foreign currency reserves are in dollars, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). While much has been made of its relative decline in central bank reserves over the past few decades, the reserves statistics arguably underplay the dollar’s centrality. There are many other pots of sovereign and quasi-sovereign money that are not captured by the IMF’s data on foreign exchange reserves, and whether you are a bank in Mongolia, a pension plan in Chile, a European insurance group or a Singaporean hedge fund, dollars are the ultimate reserve asset.