Abstract:
Tiny changes in the American monetary policy can have dramatic effects on the rest of the world because of its double role of national and international currency. This is what I call the Triffin dilemma, an ever green concept in international finance. In the paper I show how it works through three examples: price of commodities, dollarization, and the international financial position of the US. I argue that to solve this situation, it would be important to create a more democratic monetary system, in which all the countries have a decision weight. In particular, I think that globalization and regionalization should be the two forces leading towards the new monetary system. The main economies should adopt the same currency through a system of fixed exchange rates (global money); developing countries should create regional monetary unions (regional money), preserving the real exchange rate as real shock absorber, but gaining in terms of time consistency and credibility.