US Federal Reserve becoming de facto world central bank

On Sunday, I warned about indications that there may be a move afoot to establish a global central bank, I also said that "the US benefits from the current arrangement [with the US dollar as the world reserve currency] and will resist any adjustment away from it, but when it becomes clear that it cannot last, it will jockey for the highest position in the system that follows."

I imagined it might happen along the lines laid out by Hans-Hermann Hoppe in 2003:

Even this system is unsatisfactory, however. In a world of many countries, and even if the U.S. is a superpower with troops stationed in well over 100 countries around the globe, this system of coordinated inflation is bound to crack again and again... [A] U.S.-dominated country might suffer more inflation than the U.S., its currency would depreciate against the dollar, and in order to save government-connected investors in those countries, the U.S. might be compelled to engage in expensive bailout operations, i.e., buying up the falling currency in order to stabilize it.

...As the final solution in the drive toward monetary imperialism and as a decisive intermediate step in the drive toward world government, the U.S. has been working long and hard to establish a U.S.-controlled world central bank issuing a single, world-wide accepted paper currency. Only then are all obstacles to government counterfeiting eliminated because then the currency can no longer rise or fall against any other as no other currencies are left. The monetary integration currently under way in Europe, the establishment of a Europe-wide EURO, is an important step in this direction. (emphasis mine)

The US has not begun buying failing foreign currencies (among which I am tempted to count the pound sterling), but on Monday when the US Federal Reserve announced an agreement to extend an unlimited amount of loans to the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, and the Swiss National Bank, it amounted to, as Michael Rozeff points out, the Federal Reserve directly delegating itself the role of a de facto world central bank, a lender of last resort for foreign central banks.