• De-dollarization efforts won't do much to dethrone the dollar, Morgan Stanley said.

• There are no true alternatives to holding the US dollar at the moment, Morgan Stanley strategists said.

• The bank pointed to three reasons why de-dollarization fears are overblown.

The dollar's status as the top currency of central banks and for international trade probably isn't fading soon, according to Morgan Stanley.

The investment bank pointed to fears that the US dollar could eventually be dethroned as the world's top-held and most widely used currency. Rivals like the Chinese yuan or the Japanese yen or even a shared BRICS currency could disrupt the dollar's stats, some commentators have warned, but there are key reasons dollar dominance isn't going away anytime soon, Morgan Stanley strategists said.

"Which currency would you want to own when global stock markets start to fall, and the global economy tends to head into recession? You want to be positioning in US dollars because that has historically been the exchange rate reaction to those kinds of events." James Lord, the bank's head of FX strategy for emerging markets, said in a recent podcast.

"Bottom line, King dollar doesn't really have any challengers," Michael Zezas, the firm's head of US public policy research, added.

The firm pointed to three factors that will keep the dollar's top-dog status in financial markets:

1. The yuan isn't liquid enough to challenge the dollar

China's yuan, which officials in Beijing have been trying to position as a challenger to the dollar on the world stage, isn't liquid enough to truly disrupt the dominance of the greenback, the strategists said. That's partly due to strict capital controls China has on its currency, which limit the amount of cash that can be taken in and out of the country.

"It seems unlikely to challenge the US dollar meaningfully anytime soon. To do so, we think China would need to relax control of its currency and open the capital account. It doesn't seem likely that Beijing will want to do this anytime soon," Lord said.

Questions also linger over China's economy, given sagging  consumer demand and the nation's ongoing property crisis.

"China may make some progress in denominating more of its bilateral trade in US dollars, but the impact that that has on global metrics of currency dominance is likely to be incremental," Lord added.

2. Concerns over the US debt won't affect the dollar.

Dollar doomsayers say trust is waning in the greenback as concerns mount over the US's rising debt balance. As of this year, the government has racked up over $34 trillion in debt, a record amount.