Headscratchers / The Rover

• Odd economics. We see several instances of merchants only willing to accept US dollars. Its seems highly unlikely in a global economic collapse, that the US dollar would retain any value whatsoever, even as toilet paper, and especially, in far off Australia. When one considers the questionable basis of the US dollars 'worth' now, with no collapse, its hard to see how Australians in a barely functioning society would consider taking US money at all. On the other hand, the nature, extent and details of the vaguely described economic collapse are never fully explored. There is clearly some trade going on, as we see from the guarded coal trains (presumably shipping coal to China or other Asian destinations), but again details are sketchy...
  • The very fact that people are still using money rather than returning to a straight barter system shows that the world economy hasn't collapsed completely. For hundreds of years, people have used foreign currency when their own nation is too weak to back its own, and today many nations around the world use the US dollar or Euro. Early Americans initially preferred Spanish currency when the United States started printing its own. It's not terribly unlikely that, in a global economic crisis, some people might have reason to put more faith in American dollars than their local currency.