Dollar use in global trade rose to high amid war, Swift says

The ongoing conflict in the Middle East is solidifying the US dollar’s dominant role in global trade, according to one measure of activity in the interbank foreign-exchange markets.

The greenback’s portion of international transactions rose to a record 51.1% in March, up from 49.2% a month earlier, according to the latest data compiled by global financial messaging service Swift, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. That’s the highest share since 2023 when the Belgium-headquartered consortium revised how it collects the transaction data.

Large global banks use Swift to communicate with each other and facilitate interbank currency deals. The world’s primary reserve currency was followed by the euro, which carried about a 21% share via Swift, then the pound, yen, Chinese yuan and Canadian dollar.

“Dollar weakness seen last year has not translated into any clear decline in the dollar’s role as a reserve or base currency for capital markets,” a JPMorgan research team led by Joyce Chang said in an April 21 note.

In 2025, a gauge of the greenback fell by 8% to its lowest level in four years. Since the start of the Iran war in late February, it has gained about 0.8%.

Trading in the currency markets was exceptionally choppy last month following the launch of US and Israeli strikes against Iran, driving a global selloff in risky assets, a surge in oil prices and demand for the haven dollar.

A gauge of the greenback’s expected volatility over the next month surged to a 10-month high in March, although gyrations have quieted since as investors focus on the outlook of ceasefire negotiations between the US and Iran.

What Bloomberg strategists say…

“Markets are putting a lot of faith in President Trump’s desire to end the Iran war, treating renewed escalation as a low-probability risk even though the facts on the ground remain highly uncertain. Investors have gone back to taking comfort from earnings beats, AI capex growth tailwinds and a US consumer that has so far absorbed higher gasoline prices better than feared.”

— Michael Ball, Macro Strategist, Markets Live

Still, investors have a keen eye on the international usage of the greenback — and the appeal of US assets more broadly — since President Donald Trump unveiled a sweeping program of tariffs early last year.

“We see a broader trend toward diversification rather than outright de-dollarization, and the data fail to demonstrate broad-based de-dollarization,” JPMorgan’s Chang and team said.

Swift’s data doesn’t encompass the entire $9.5 trillion-per-day currency markets. In 2022, for example, it began excluding several major Russian banks from the service following the invasion of Ukraine. And while it measures trading activity by currency, the figures don’t reveal the underlying direction of the flows between banks. Some 13.4 billion trade instructions were sent via Swift in 2024, according to its latest annual review published last year, up from 11.9 billion the year before.

China has its own cross-border interbank payments system, called CIPS, that includes messaging tools akin to Swift. But since 2015, its adoption among global banks has come in fits and starts. The yuan’s share of activity via Swift, meanwhile, rose to 3.1% in March — although that is below the currency’s all-time high seen back in 2024.