Oil Currency and the Dollar Standard: A Simple Analytical Model of an International Trade Currency

The U.S. dollar is the central reference currency for international trade pricing and the main invoicing currency for primary commodities. This paper links these two observations within a stylized theoretical framework, and shows how to obtain a quantitative estimate of the gain to the U.S. economy when the dollar is a reference currency. With dollar invoicing of primary commodities, U.S. firms bear less exchange rate risk than foreign firms. This asymmetry leads to a dollar standard in international goods pricing. We then derive a simple analytical formula to calculate the gains and find that they are extremely small.