Defaulting banks - where will it stop?

[Jan Klimkowski]

More on those lurverly lil' critters, IMF Special Drawing Rights:

SDRs basically were created to replace gold in large international transactions. Being that under a strict (international) gold standard, the quantity of gold worldwide is relatively fixed, and the economies of all participating IMF members as an aggregate are growing, a perceived need arose to increase the supply of the basic unit or standard proportionately. Thus SDRs, or "paper gold", are credits that nations with balance of trade surpluses can 'draw' upon nations with balance of trade deficits.

So-called "paper gold" is little more than an accounting transaction within a ledger of accounts, which eliminates the logistical and security problems of shipping gold back and forth across borders to settle national accounts.

Joseph Stiglitz has argued that usage by central banks of SDRs as foreign exchange reserve could be viewed as the prelude to the creation of a single world currency.[2] It has also been suggested that having holders of US dollars convert those dollars into SDRs would allow diversification away from the dollar without accelerating the decline of the value of the dollar.[3][4]

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2 Stiglitz, Joseph (2006). Making Globalization Work. Penguin Books. pp. 261–263. ISBN 0-393-06122-1.
3 Special drawing rights : Here's a good way solve the dollar problem - International Herald Tribune
4 FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment - How to solve the problem of the dollar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Drawing_Rights

It all rather begs the question:

These hundreds of billions of quantitatively eased (aka freshly printed) SDRs will be backed by precisely what?

Tulips, anyone? antaclaus: