@MostlyHarmless I made the mistake of asking my gramps that question when I was a kid, and then endured a 2 hour drive and lecture about modern monetary theory, bretton woods, gold standard, petrodollar, European Central Bank, even a brief tangent about the soft-peg CAD/USD conversion.

And then it dawns on me like 20 years later that I do exactly the same thing to my wife and our friends lol