How US imperialism 🇺🇸 works in 2026: Michael Hudson’s Super-Imperialism for dummies. After World War II, the US was left with the majority of the world’s gold reserves. The Bretton Woods system was created, making the U.S. dollar (USD) convertible to gold at $35 an ounce while pegging the currencies of other countries to the USD. At this time, the U.S. generally ran trade surpluses, meaning it exported more goods than it imported. This would change throughout the 1950s as overseas military spending increased dramatically, particularly through the wars in Korea 🇰🇵 and Vietnam 🇻🇳. This created a balance of payments deficit, where more money was leaving the U.S. than was coming in. As a result, foreign banks and companies ended up with a glut of U.S. dollars and were pressured by the U.S. government not to exchange them for gold, as this could have led to a drain on U.S. gold reserves and undercut the basis of American global financial hegemony. Instead, foreign banks invested their surplus USD into Treasury securities and other U.S. financial assets, recycling those dollars back into the American economy, where they could continue financing massive military spending. When Nixon ended dollar convertibility into gold in 1971, this system was solidified because countries no longer had the option to exchange their USD for gold. U.S. Treasury securities effectively replaced gold as the primary reserve asset of the international monetary system. The U.S. could now run persistent deficits without having to worry about a drain on its gold reserves undermining its financial power. Around this same period, the so-called petrodollar system emerged, ensuring that one of the world’s most important commodities would be priced in USD, further strengthening the dollar’s global role. This is why we have a hyper-financialized U.S. economy that seems to produce nothing except war and Wall Street profits. The recycling of USD allows elites to generate enormous paper wealth through financial speculation, interest, and rent extraction, rather than investing in productive economic activity such as manufacturing. Trump promised to fix this problem on the campaign trail, but he was always far too stupid to understand what was actually going on, and far too corrupt to do anything about it even if he did. Ultimately, this system has always been enforced at the barrel of a gun through U.S. military supremacy, which allows Washington to pressure other countries into complying with its financial demands.