One World Currency

The Economist's 1988 cover: a phoenix rising from burning banknotes, dated 2018.

The Economist's January 1988 cover — a phoenix wearing a coin dated 2018, rising from burning national banknotes, headlined 'Get ready for a world currency' — is real and framed in a thousand offices of the suspicious. The article proposed an IMF-anchored unit; the IMF's SDR exists and grew a yuan component on schedule. Keynes' original Bretton Woods proposal (the bancor) was exactly this. The entry connects the Fed thread to the CBDC thread: the destination the whole money file argues about, printed by the money press itself, thirty years early, as advice.