There seems to be this meme that hyperinflation is always painful. Long-term hyperinflation is painful because nobody wants your currency and that causes all kinds of problems.
Short-term hyperinflation is short-term disruptive, but it also has the result of effectively wiping out your debts (which would be helpful on net to most in the US, including the government), and then people just adjust to the new prices, which are higher but become stable, and wages rise to compensate.
The main loss to the US from not being the reserve currency would be that they couldn't keep printing even more money without incurring the normal amount of inflation that usually implies for everybody else. But that's assuming the rest of the world is even interested in handing that power to somebody else. And who would that be? Everybody wants it to be themselves, which is what nobody else wants. Meanwhile all the powerful international holders of US debt have a huge interest in it continuing to be the US, since they're the ones the wiping out of dollar-denominated debts would hurt the most.
And none of that seems especially likely in the immediate future, because the Fed is doing all it can right now to prevent deflation, by keeping interest rates on the floor and printing a ton of money. It would be so easy for them to prevent inflation right now that all they would have to do is stop actively doing half the things they're doing to prevent its opposite. So it only happens if they want it to.
Short-term hyperinflation is short-term disruptive, but it also has the result of effectively wiping out your debts (which would be helpful on net to most in the US, including the government), and then people just adjust to the new prices, which are higher but become stable, and wages rise to compensate.
The main loss to the US from not being the reserve currency would be that they couldn't keep printing even more money without incurring the normal amount of inflation that usually implies for everybody else. But that's assuming the rest of the world is even interested in handing that power to somebody else. And who would that be? Everybody wants it to be themselves, which is what nobody else wants. Meanwhile all the powerful international holders of US debt have a huge interest in it continuing to be the US, since they're the ones the wiping out of dollar-denominated debts would hurt the most.
And none of that seems especially likely in the immediate future, because the Fed is doing all it can right now to prevent deflation, by keeping interest rates on the floor and printing a ton of money. It would be so easy for them to prevent inflation right now that all they would have to do is stop actively doing half the things they're doing to prevent its opposite. So it only happens if they want it to.