
King Dollar
The Past and Future of the World's Dominant Currency
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Narrated by:
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David Stifel
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By:
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Paul Blustein
About this listen
An award-winning economic journalist on why the US dollar is positioned to maintain global primacy—and what that means for America and the world
Prophecies that the dollar will lose its status as the world's dominant currency have echoed for decades—and are increasing in volume. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts claim that Bitcoin or other blockchain-based monetary units will replace the dollar. Foreign policy hawks warn that China's renminbi poses a lethal threat to the greenback. And sound money zealots predict that mounting US debt and inflation will surely erode the dollar's value to the point of irrelevancy.
Contra the doomsayers, Paul Blustein shows that the dollar's standing atop the world's currency pyramid is impregnable, barring catastrophic policy missteps by the US government. Recounting how the United States has wielded the dollar to impose devastating sanctions against adversaries, Blustein explains that although targets such as Russia have found ways to limit the damage, Washington's financial weaponry will retain potency long into the future. His message, however, is that America must not be complacent about the dollar; the great power that its supremacy confers comes with commensurate responsibility.
©2025 Paul Blustein (P)2025 Ascent AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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If you could pose one question to a dolphin, what would it be? And what might a dolphin ask you? For forty years, researcher and author Denise L. Herzing has investigated these and related questions of marine mammal communication. But the dolphins are not the only ones talking, and in this wide-ranging and accessible book, Herzing explores the astonishing realities of interspecies communication, a skill that humans currently lack.
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Pigeons
- The Fascinating Saga of the World's Most Revered and Reviled Bird
- By: Andrew D. Blechman
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 5 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Domesticated since the dawn of man, pigeons have been used as crucial communicators in war by every major historical superpower from ancient Egypt to the United States and are credited with saving thousands of lives. They have been worshipped as fertility goddesses and revered as symbols of peace. Charles Darwin relied heavily on pigeons to help formulate and support his theory of evolution. Yet today they are reviled as "rats with wings."
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Why Taiwan Matters
- A Short History of a Small Island That Will Dictate Our Future
- By: Kerry Brown
- Narrated by: Kerry Brown
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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When the bloody Chinese Civil War concluded in 1949, two Chinas were born. Mao’s Communists won and took China’s mainland; Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled to Taiwan island. Since then, China and Taiwan have drifted into being separate political and cultural entities. Taiwan is now a flourishing democracy and an economic success story: just one of its companies produces over 90 per cent of the semiconductors that power the world’s economy. It is a free and vibrant society.
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Redundant
- By Phillip Enoch on 03-06-25
By: Kerry Brown
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Blackwater
- The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
- By: Jeremy Scahill
- Narrated by: Tom Weiner
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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On September 16, 2007, machine gun fire erupted in Baghdad's Nisour Square, leaving seventeen Iraqi civilians dead, among them women and children. The shooting spree, labeled "Baghdad's Bloody Sunday," was neither the work of Iraqi insurgents nor U.S. soldiers. The shooters were private forces, subcontractors working for the secretive mercenary company, Blackwater Worldwide, led by Erik Prince
By: Jeremy Scahill
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The Insider's Guide to Innovation @ Microsoft
- By: JoAnn Garbin, Dean Carignan, Eric Horvitz - foreword
- Narrated by: JoAnn Garbin
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Are there innovation truisms that hold from one initiative to the next? Are there strategies that appear again and again in the success stories of businesses as varied as gaming and cloud infrastructure? Are there behaviors common to creative leadership in every role, from research to sales? And if these patterns exist, could they be distilled into teachable practices? These are the questions Dean Carignan and JoAnn Garbin, two senior innovation leaders at Microsoft, set out to answer.
By: JoAnn Garbin, and others
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Let Only Red Flowers Bloom
- Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping's China
- By: Emily Feng
- Narrated by: Emily Feng
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The rise of China and its great power competition with the U.S. will be one of the defining issues of our generation. But to understand modern China, one has to understand the people who live there–and the way the Chinese state is trying to control them along lines of identity and free expression. In vivid, cinematic detail, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom tells the stories of nearly two dozen people who are pushing back.
By: Emily Feng
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AI Valley
- Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence
- By: Gary Rivlin
- Narrated by: Joe Knezevich
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Artificial Intelligence has been “just around the corner” for decades, continually disappointing those who long believed in its potential. But now, with the emergence and growing use of ChatGPT, Gemini, and a rapidly multiplying number of other AI tools, many are wondering: Has AI’s moment finally arrived? In AI Valley, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Rivlin brings us deep into the world of AI development in Silicon Valley. Over the course of more than a year, Rivlin closely follows founders and venture capitalists trying to capitalize on this AI moment.
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A dizzying account of the development of AI
- By ER on 03-31-25
By: Gary Rivlin
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Lincoln's Peace
- The Struggle to End the American Civil War
- By: Michael Vorenberg
- Narrated by: Landon Woodson
- Length: 16 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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We set out on the James River, March 25, 1865, aboard the paddle steamboat River Queen. President Lincoln is on his way to General Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, and he’s decided he won’t return to Washington until he’s witnessed, or perhaps even orchestrated, the end of the Civil War. Now, it turns out, more than a century and a half later, historians are still searching for that end.
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Out of the Darkness
- The Germans, 1942-2022
- By: Frank Trentmann
- Narrated by: Patty Nieman
- Length: 37 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. Its citizens stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and war of extermination. But by the end of Angela Merkel’s tenure in 2021, Germany looked like the moral voice of Europe. How did a nation whose past has been marked by mass murder reinvent themselves, and how much? Trentmann tells this dramatic story of the German people from the middle of the Second World War through the Cold War and the division of East and West to the fall of the Berlin Wall and their struggle to find their place in the world today.
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A very long book
- By Georjaneknighthawk on 03-20-24
By: Frank Trentmann
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Rot
- An Imperial History of the Irish Famine
- By: Padraic X. Scanlan
- Narrated by: Stephen Hogan
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate. In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation.
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Really great work of history
- By Anonymous User on 04-12-25