"It's definitely going to happen," McDonald said. "It's not a near term problem, maybe 20 to 30 because the US has so much wealth, we've got a lot of military power, but there's no question. The peak dollar best years are right about here."
McDonald, who served as the vice president of distress debt and convertible securities trading at Lehman Brothers, pointed out that the weaponization of the SWIFT financial system may harm the US dollar's dominance by pushing banks to other substitutes.
"The sanctions-SWIFT game should be used by the West once every 10 years, but they've been using this against multiple countries," McDonald said. "Sanctions against Russia in a war, okay, that's fine. From a US perspective the problem is you've hit 10 different countries over the head with the sanctions card, so you're forcing these countries to form a bloc against you. That's what's happening.
Two years from now the US dollar is going to probably be much lower because countries and banks will be searching for ways around SWIFT, McDonald said.
China’s Charge d'Affaires to Russia Sun Weidong said last week that switching to payments in national currencies in Russian-Chinese trade is speeding up the process of global de-dollarization.
Moscow has repeatedly pointed out that Washington's sanctions policy undermines confidence in the dollar, reduces national reserves investment in the US public debt, and contributes to increasing the volume of foreign trade in rubles and other currencies.
At the same time, the Russian authorities have maintained that the de-dollarization policy does not entail a ban on dollar circulation, but rather creates economically beneficial conditions for the use of other currencies.
McDonald is co-author with Patrick Robinson of "A Colossal Failure of Common Sense," which is about the fall of Lehman Brothers and the 2008 financial crisis.