The Dollar's Share of FX Reserves Hasn't Fallen Meaningfully Since 2015

In the fourth quarter of 2025, the U.S. dollar accounted for 56.77% of global disclosed foreign exchange reserves, according to the IMF's COFER database. That number — cited routinely as evidence of American decline — is almost exactly where it stood in 1995, when the dollar held roughly 66% of reserves on the older IMF methodology. It is down from the 2001 peak of 72%. But the entire decline happened between 2001 and 2015. Over the past decade, the dollar's reserve share has drifted from roughly 59% to 57% — a two-percentage-point erosion in ten years.

That is not a trend. That is a flatline.

The de-dollarization narrative has become one of the most durable stories in global macroeconomics. It is invoked by BRICS summits, gold-bug newsletters, and IMF working papers alike. It has a kernel of truth — a genuine, decade-and-a-half decline in the dollar's reserve share. But it conflates a completed historical event with a present trajectory. The key to understanding what happened is to decompose the decline by period and ask who gained share, and when.

The Arc: A One-Time Diversification, Decomposed by Period

The dollar's reserve share moved in three distinct phases, and the identity of the gainers reveals more than the headline number.

Phase 1: 2001–2010. Dollar share: 72% → 62%.

The euro was the primary gainer. Launched in 1999, the euro rose from roughly 18% of disclosed reserves in 2001 to roughly 26% by 2010. This was the structural diversification that the euro's creation enabled: reserve managers had a credible, liquid alternative to the dollar for the first time in a generation. The yen held roughly steady at 4-5%. The British pound, Swiss franc, Australian dollar, and Canadian dollar collectively added perhaps two percentage points.

Phase 2: 2010–2015. Dollar share: 62% → 59%.

The diversification broadened but slowed. The euro's share peaked and began a modest decline. The Australian and Canadian dollars — boosted by the commodity supercycle and favorable interest-rate differentials — rose from roughly 2% to 5% of reserves combined. The Chinese renminbi entered the reserve system following the IMF's decision to include it in the Special Drawing Rights basket, reaching roughly 1% of disclosed reserves by 2015. This was the period of maximum diversification velocity.

Phase 3: 2015–2025. Dollar share: 59% → 57%.

The diversification stopped. The dollar lost two percentage points over ten years. The euro drifted down from roughly 20% to 19.8%. The yen held steady at roughly 5.4%. The renminbi rose from roughly 1% to 2%, peaking at 2.8% in 2022 before settling at 1.95% in late 2025. The real gainer in this period was the residual "other currencies" category — which rose from roughly 3% to 6%. That category includes the Australian and Canadian dollars, Swiss franc, Korean won, Swedish krona, and a dozen smaller currencies.

A reserve manager shifting from dollars into Australian and Canadian dollars is making a carry-trade and liquidity decision. A reserve manager shifting into the renminbi — with its closed capital account, tightly managed exchange rate, and limited sovereign bond market — is making a strategic statement. The past decade has seen more of the former than the latter.

The FX Market: The Dollar Is Gaining Share

If the reserve data shows a flatline, the foreign exchange market — a larger, more liquid, and structurally different measure of currency dominance — shows the dollar strengthening.

The Bank for International Settlements' triennial survey of FX turnover, released in September 2025, found that the U.S. dollar was on one side of 89.2% of all trades in April 2025. That is up from 88.4% in 2022, 88.3% in 2019, and 87% in 2013. The dollar's share of the world's $9.6 trillion in daily FX turnover has never been higher in the 30-year history of the BIS survey.

The euro's share, by contrast, declined to 28.9% in 2025 — down from 30.6% in 2022 and 32.3% in 2019. The yen held steady at 16.8%. The Chinese renminbi has risen from 4.3% of trades in 2019 (eighth place) to roughly 7% in 2022 (fifth place). Every percentage point the renminbi gained came at the expense of the euro and the yen — not the dollar.

A currency that is supposedly being abandoned as the world's reserve asset does not, as a rule, power a rising share of the world's largest financial market. The FX turnover data is not a survey of sentiment or a policy statement. It is a census of actual transactions: $9.6 trillion per day of revealed behavior. By that measure, the dollar's dominance is expanding, not contracting.

The Other Metrics: Flat or Rising

The FX reserve and transaction data sit within a broader constellation of currency-dominance metrics, and the pattern is consistent:

Cross-border lending: The dollar's share of cross-border bank loans has risen since 2010 and remains dominant, according to the BIS locational banking statistics cited by the Federal Reserve. The dollar accounts for roughly 60% of all cross-border claims.

International debt securities: The dollar's share of foreign-currency debt issuance has held at roughly 60% since 2010. The euro's share is approximately 26%, and the yen's share has collapsed from roughly 15% in the mid-1990s to 1% today.

SWIFT payments: The dollar accounted for approximately 50% of SWIFT payment traffic in 2024, according to the Federal Reserve, "even slightly increased in recent years." When intra-euro-area payments are excluded, the dollar's share rises to roughly 60%.

Trade invoicing: The dollar remains the dominant global vehicle currency for trade invoicing. For most countries outside Europe, the share of exports invoiced in dollars is a multiple of the share of exports sent to the United States — a pattern that reflects the dollar's role as an intermediary, not just a bilateral settlement currency.

In every structural measure of international currency use — reserves, FX trading, lending, debt issuance, payments, trade invoicing — the dollar's position is either flat or rising.

The Yuan's Two Channels: SWIFT Declines, CIPS Stalls

The yuan's internationalization story is told through two payment systems — SWIFT, the dominant global messaging network, and CIPS, China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System. Together they reveal a currency that gained ground rapidly from 2020 to 2024 and then stalled.

On SWIFT, the yuan's global payments share peaked at 4.74% in December 2023 and has since declined to 2.89% by May 2025 — a 39% drop in 17 months, according to the SWIFT RMB Tracker. For context, 2.89% places the yuan below the dollar (49%), euro (22%), and pound (7%). The surge and subsequent decline reflect a pattern visible in multiple yuan internationalization episodes: a policy-driven push — often linked to commodity trade settlement with Russia, Brazil, or Saudi Arabia — followed by a plateau or reversal as the structural constraints of capital controls and limited bond-market depth reassert themselves.

CIPS tells a parallel story. Launched in 2015 as China's dedicated yuan clearing infrastructure, CIPS has expanded to 1,766 participants across 124 countries. In 2024, CIPS processed ¥175.49 trillion ($24.4 trillion) in transactions, a 43% year-on-year increase — the largest annual jump since the system's inception. The market read this as evidence of breakaway yuan internationalization.

Then growth collapsed. In 2025, CIPS processed ¥180.15 trillion ($25.6 trillion) — a 1.02% increase, essentially flat. Transaction count rose by the same 1.02%, to 8.44 million. Daily average volume settled at ¥680 billion ($96 billion). For comparison, SWIFT processes roughly $5 trillion in payment messages per day — roughly 50 times CIPS's daily average. The ratio puts CIPS's scale in context: it is a large and growing national clearing system, but it remains roughly 2% the size of the global network it was designed to complement.

The CIPS participant geography is similarly revealing. Asia accounts for 73% of CIPS indirect participants. Europe accounts for 17%. North America accounts for 2% — a share that has barely moved. The yuan's international use remains overwhelmingly Asian, overwhelmingly trade-settlement-driven, and overwhelmingly dependent on Chinese counterparties dictating the invoicing currency.

What Is Actually Happening: Gold and Trade Settlement

Two phenomena are routinely cited as evidence of de-dollarization, and both require disaggregation.

Gold: Central bank gold purchases have risen sharply, particularly among emerging-market central banks. China, India, Poland, Turkey, and Singapore have all added to their gold reserves since 2022. The gold share of EM central bank reserves has risen from roughly 4% to 9% over the past decade.

But gold is not a dollar substitute. It is a distinct asset class — a non-yielding, non-sovereign store of value that central banks have held for centuries. The shift into gold reflects two forces: a desire to hedge against domestic currency risk and, following the 2022 freezing of Russian reserves, a recognition that dollar and euro reserves carry geopolitical contingency. The crucial distinction: central banks buying gold is not dedollarizing. It is buying insurance against the financial sanctions regime — a response to the dollar system's power, not its weakness.

RMB trade settlement: The share of China's own goods trade settled in renminbi has risen from roughly 11% in 2017 to 28% in the first half of 2025, according to Chinese official data. This is the one metric where the de-dollarization narrative has genuine traction. China — the world's largest trading nation — is increasingly invoicing its own trade in its own currency.

But this is not yuan internationalization in the sense of third parties using the currency independently. It is China settling China's trade in China's currency — a logical, incremental shift that says more about China's bargaining power with commodity exporters than about the renminbi's appeal as a global store of value. A Brazilian soybean exporter accepting yuan because the Chinese buyer insists on it is not evidence of the renminbi displacing the dollar. It is evidence that when you are the world's largest importer of soybeans, you can dictate the invoicing currency.

The Quant Assessment

The de-dollarization narrative is not false. It is stale. It describes a shift that occurred between 2001 and 2015 — the euro's emergence, the post-GFC diversification into Australian and Canadian dollars, the slow addition of smaller currencies to central bank portfolios. That shift was real, significant, and reduced the dollar's reserve share by 13 percentage points.

But the narrative has continued to run at full intensity for a decade after the data stopped moving. The dollar's reserve share has been flat since 2015. Its FX market share has risen to an all-time high of 89.2%. Its dominance in lending, debt issuance, and payments is intact. The yuan, after a genuine rise from irrelevance to 2-3% of global reserves and payments, has stalled — declining on SWIFT and flatlining on CIPS.

What has changed since 2022 — and what drives the narrative's persistence — is not the data. It is the geopolitics. The freezing of Russian central bank reserves convinced many observers that the dollar system's weaponization would trigger a rapid diversification away from it. That diversification may yet occur. But as of the most recent data, it has not. Central banks have bought gold. They have not dumped dollars.

The gap between the de-dollarization narrative and the dollar-dominance data is one of the widest in global macroeconomics. The narrative describes a world that existed in 2010. The data describes a world where the dollar is, by every meaningful measure, as entrenched as it was when you started reading the de-dollarization headlines — and in the $9.6 trillion-a-day FX market, more so.

Sources: IMF COFER (Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves), quarterly through 2025Q4; Federal Reserve Board, "The International Role of the U.S. Dollar" (2025 edition); BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey of FX Turnover (April 2025, released September 2025); BIS locational banking statistics; SWIFT RMB Tracker; CIPS Co Ltd annual statistics via China Data Portal; People's Bank of China; New York Federal Reserve Staff Report No. 1087; FXC Intelligence, "Is China's cross-border payments network on the rise?" (July 2025).