General Discussion

Every business that goes into decline overestimates its customers' switching costs right before it starts its decline.

Customers of Facebook have virtually no switching costs. That company could become MySpace as easily as it made MySpace into MySpace. Microsoft has serious network effects, but Apple and Google's are much less. It is worth noting that IBM dominated technology for about 20 years in a way that none of Microsoft, Google and Apply have been able to do. Things change.

It is a lot easier to switch from the dollar than that article says. To be honest, the world doesn't really need a reserve currency anymore in the electronic age when financial transactions can occur in an instant. All Trump has done is pushed the world towards operationalizing this future reality.

There is a tendency among all people, including political and economic writers, to view the world through their own biases. That view will miss a lot of outcomes. It is naive to think that much of the rest of the world has not been preparing for an American dictatorship or decline given the two terrible Republican Presidents of this century. I think we will find that the rest of the world is more capable of moving away from the U.S. then writers like the one of that article think.