For folks getting really excited here about the US, the US Dollar, etc. - imagine that, for some weird reason, the world's reserve currency was the Tongan paʻanga ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_pa%CA%BBanga ). And that (similar to what the the story notes, for USD) Ghana's reserve of paʻanga was running low, so they were looking to buy oil with gold instead of paʻanga, to (as others have noted) put a smokescreen in front of a big new tax on local gold producers in Ghana. (Gold was ~50% of Ghana's exports in 2019, so there's plenty of income to tax there.)
How differently would you view this situation and story, if "US" and "USD" were replaced with (presumably emotionally neutral) "Tonga" and "paʻanga"?
For folks getting really excited here about the US, the US Dollar, etc. - imagine that, for some weird reason, the world's reserve currency was the Tongan paʻanga ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_pa%CA%BBanga ). And that (similar to what the the story notes, for USD) Ghana's reserve of paʻanga was running low, so they were looking to buy oil with gold instead of paʻanga, to (as others have noted) put a smokescreen in front of a big new tax on local gold producers in Ghana. (Gold was ~50% of Ghana's exports in 2019, so there's plenty of income to tax there.)
How differently would you view this situation and story, if "US" and "USD" were replaced with (presumably emotionally neutral) "Tonga" and "paʻanga"?