Blast from the Past (Stiglitz 2005)

Note the following from Stiglitz, p. 254:

In early 2005, China announced that it is no longer committed to holding reserves in dollars. It had, in fact, already moved substantial amounts out of dollars (about a quarter of its reserve), but the announcement had immense symbolic value. Other central bankers, more in keeping with their tradition of staying out of the public eye, quietly confided to me that they too were moving out of dollars.

Compare with the news from 2009 that China is calling for a new international reserve currency to replace the dollar, as reported in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, among other places.

Two notes on this. First, the interest in diversifying away from the dollar is not a product of the recent financial crisis; rather it has been percolating for longer than that as a way to address "global imbalances", as Wolf would call them. Second, this proposal is not far off from what Stiglitz proposed in his reformed "global reserve system". To that, I can only say, hmm.