Does the US have dollars?

An odd thing happened today, the kind of thing that makes it hard to explain the US to the rest of the world, as if that were possible. I received a check from a bank - a banker's check, mind you - in the US, closing out an account. I took it to a Swiss bank, which sounds terribly exotic unless you live in Switzerland and that means your local bank and forget the silly nonsense of numbered accounts, a kind of James Bond myth. The man studied and studied the check and finally asked what currency I thought it was in. Dollars, of course, I said. It's a US bank. But it doesn't say dollars, he pointed out. It doeesn't give any currency.

Sure enough. Several minutes and some phone call later we all agreed that it must be a check in dollars, but the bank staff drew round to see this odd specimen, a check drawn on - no currency at all. "I've never seen that before, " said the young man, and bankers in Switzerland routinely see money from several countries. "As if they didn't know there are other currencies," someone else said.