It may not be exactly what President Obama had in mind when he talked about a pivot to Asia, but feature the latest news in respect of the dollar. According to a dispatch from the London Financial Times, the communist Chinese currency known as the renminbi is “rapidly displacing” the American dollar as a trading currency — not only in Asia and Europe, the FT notes, but also here at home in America. It’s a marker of America’s decline in the age of fiat money.

The value of renminbi payments between America and the rest of the world, the Financial Times reports, rose by 327 percent in April as compared to the year-earlier month. The FT is quoting numbers from the settlement firm known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. The newspaper quotes an officer of Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation in New York, Debra Lodge, as predicting that the share of Communist China’s trade settled in renminbi will more than double to 30% by the end of next year.

If the absolute size of the renminbi-denominated trade is relatively modest at the moment and animated by commercial considerations, the Financial Times reports, the trend “carries a strategic resonance.” It characterizes the communists “promotion of the renminbi internationally” as having been “impelled by the frustration Beijing felt in 2008 and 2009 as it watched the value of its vast US treasury holdings plunge along with the dollar’s value.” The FT reckons that over time the trend is “set to free China by degrees from its uncomfortable inclusion in the US dollar zone and boost its financial independence.”

So just to mark the point: China is testing America and Japan (and the rest of the free world) with its Navy; America is releasing its enemy commanders in a prisoner exchange; America is also reducing the size of its armed forces; the state secretary who is shilling for the pivot to Asia is the same person who agitated for the retreat from Vietnam by likening American GIs to Genghis Khan. And now the communist Chinese scrip is gradually, or not so gradually, eclipsing the dollar that John Kennedy once vowed would remain as good as gold. Let us just say, it’s a pivotal moment.