Recently, I’ve been thinking about a question: why can some countries print money at will, yet the global economy doesn’t collapse? The answer is actually very simple—because the United States is printing money.

Imagine a village, where there are “families” such as the United States, China, Germany, France, Russia, Vietnam, and others. Each family produces different goods and trades with one another. At first, everyone used gold for transactions, but gold was too heavy and too inconvenient, so the United States proposed replacing it with paper money. Because the United States is the strongest family in the village, everyone trusts it, so they all accepted the US dollar.

That’s how the United States began printing money. But there’s a key point here—while the United States can print money, other people can’t. Why? Because the whole world recognizes the US dollar. The money the United States prints flows into the global economy, and the cost of inflation is borne by the entire world.

Let me give an extreme example. Mugabe in Zimbabwe also wanted to print money to solve economic problems—what happened? In 1980, 1 US dollar could be exchanged for 0.678 Zimbabwean dollars. By 2008, 1 US dollar could be exchanged for 5 million Zimbabwean dollars. The inflation rate jumped from 55% in 2000 to 220,000% in 2008. People had to pull carts loaded with money just to move it around to buy a loaf of bread.

Why did Zimbabwe’s printing of money get out of control, while the US’s printing of dollars could be maintained? Because the dollar is an international currency, and the US’s money-printing is absorbed by the world. The United States carries out “quantitative easing”—the Federal Reserve prints money, the government spends money (including on defense, public spending, etc.), US companies profit, and then they purchase goods around the world with US dollars. The US dollars flow into markets everywhere, and in the end, wealth returns to the United States.

But the United States also has limits. If it printed without limit, the dollar would depreciate, global inflation would rise, and the United States would also run into trouble. So the United States prints only within a range of inflation that the world can accept. This is why the United States holds the global money-printing power, yet is also the most indebted country in the world—other countries balance things out by using US dollars to buy the United States’ “century debt.”

Put simply, the power of the United States to print money is essentially built on the world’s trust in the US dollar. Once that trust collapses, everything is over.