China has spent years uneasy about parking its national savings in US dollars, a worry that is neutral for markets today but points to a slow push away from the dollar.

• After the 2008 crash, China held trillions in US government debt and watched the US print money, cutting the value of those savings.
• In 2009, China's central bank governor called for a neutral world reserve currency that no single country controls.
• The idea revived a post-war proposal for a currency backed by a basket of commodities, designed to keep trade between countries balanced.
• That plan lost in 1944 because the US was then the big exporter and did not want a system that penalized trade surpluses, so the dollar won instead.

Outlook: Expect China to keep chipping away at dollar dependence, but no replacement is close to ready.