[1] After going off of the gold standard in 1971 and setting up the petrodollar system later in the 1970s, the United States accepted the burden of such an ongoing trade deficit in 1985 with its permanent transformation from a creditor to a debtor nation.
Alternatives to international trade that address this tension include direct transfer of dollars via foreign aid and swap lines.
The Triffin dilemma is usually cited to articulate the problems with the role of the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency under the worldwide Bretton Woods system established in 1944.
Historically, the IMF's SDRs have been the closest thing to the proposed Bancor but they have not been adopted widely enough to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency.
In 1959, due to money flowing out of the country through the Marshall Plan, U.S. military budget and Americans buying foreign goods, the number of U.S. dollars in circulation exceeded the amount of gold that was backing them.
In order to maintain the Bretton Woods system, the US had to run a balance of payments current account deficit to provide liquidity for the conversion of gold into U.S. dollars.
As with all price controls,[5] this caused supply and demand imbalances and an arbitrage opportunity which rapidly depleted the United States gold reserves.
In the wake of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, the governor of the People's Bank of China explicitly named the Triffin Dilemma as the root cause of the economic disorder, in a speech titled Reform the International Monetary System.
Zhou argued that part of the reason for the original Bretton Woods system breaking down was the refusal to adopt Keynes' bancor which would have been a special international reserve currency to be used instead of the dollar.