Wealth & Money Quote by Robert C. Solomon

There is a particular kind of professorial candor in Solomon's framing: reserve-currency power, stripped of mystique, looks like a global IOU system backed by paper that other people willingly stockpile. The hook is that he refuses to treat "hegemony" as an abstraction. He reaches for the most concrete image possible - physical dollar bills scattered across the planet - to make an argument about how the United States captures value simply because the world treats its currency as the default.

The intent is explanatory, but the subtext is political: reserve status isn't just about trade invoicing or bond markets; it's about a persistent, interest-free loan. Those hundreds of billions in cash represent claims on U.S. goods and services that may never be redeemed, or will be redeemed later, letting the issuing country enjoy purchasing power up front. By emphasizing denominations "as well as ones", Solomon underscores how deep the dollar's circulation is: not merely a tool for central banks, but a street-level medium of trust.

Then he drops "a lot of them in Russia" like a wink. It's a Cold War afterimage repurposed for the post-Soviet era: even geopolitical rivals wind up relying on the dollar when local institutions are volatile, when capital wants anonymity, or when people need a portable store of value. The line "as you all know I'm sure" does double duty - it lightly needles the audience's presumed sophistication while signaling that the fact is almost embarrassingly obvious.

The quote works because it exposes reserve currency privilege as both mundane and quietly staggering: an empire of cash, circulating far from home, sustained by everyone else's need for stability.