Hacker News Reader

Comment by StephenSmith | Hacker News Reader

If the goal is to make US goods attractive to other countries and to decrease our trade deficit (not saying I agree with this goal), either the dollar has to become fundamentally weaker or the goods have to become more valuable. The latter feels more difficult than the former at this point. However, the side effects of a weaker dollar may not be worth weakening it.

View on HN

> decrease our trade deficit (not saying I agree with this goal), either the dollar

A direct link exists between a nation's status as the world's primary reserve currency and its tendency to run persistent trade deficits.

This relationship is often described by the Triffin Dilemma, a paradox where the global demand for the reserve currency necessitates that the issuing country consistently supplies the world with its currency, primarily through importing more than it exports.

The flip side is if you weaken the dollar by appearing unstable and displaying hostility to your main trade partners, you get the drawbacks of the weaker currency (reduced purchasing power) without commensurate improvement in the attractiveness of goods to other countries. Some devaluations are more strategic than others.

But the broligarchs don't need purchasing power. All their wealth is in assets, leveraged many times over. Currency collapse is the best that can happen to them.

Don't worry, assets collapse as well when a lot of the market of the US becomes unavailable.

This is the most important comment here. The US rebuilt nations' economies after World War II by printing dollars and buying goods from those countries. In return, the dollar became the world reserve currency and did not suffer massive inflation despite printing so much of it. It's a supply and demand thing, just like any good or service. There was a ton of demand for the dollar, so printing more (increasing supply) did not crash the "price" of the dollar (inflation is the price/value of the dollar decreasing). We printed a ton of dollars during covid but it didn't result in hyperinflation like what happens with, say, Iran or South American currencies because the demand for dollars was still so very high.

USA exports services (tech, culture, r&d) and will lose all of that for the unclear manufacturing that might never come.

It's like watching the fall of Rome.. on TV

It depends on how this happens. Labor would still be more expensive here than developing economies. We could easily just end up with a weaker dollar and floundering manufacturing, which means more inflation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com