Of all things, the thing that helped me understand this best was Terry Pratchett's novel Making Money. Without giving away the ending too hard: in the post-gold

Of all things, the thing that helped me understand this best was Terry Pratchett's novel Making Money. Without giving away the ending too hard: in the post-gold era, the value of a nation-state's currency has very little to do with numbers or tangibles and everything to do with the perceived power of the nation-state (although, of course, numbers and tangibles feed into that perception). The US is a huge outlier and it's hard to predict how things like "The central bank running a deficit" end up impacting the psyche of the financial decision-makers of the world.