The dollar's displacement of the British pound as reserve currency was a long, gradual process visible in debt-issuance data from the early 1800s: by the 1890s emerging markets began issuing more dollar-denominated debt and pegging exchange rates to the dollar rather than sterling—tell-tale signs the pound faced competition—but sterling was not fully displaced until the official end of the sterling zone in 1967, by which time it had de facto already happened.