Trump’s dollar defence plan: It’ll hurt more than benefit the US

Donald Trump’s strategy for re-election is centred on speaking to the darkest fears of Americans. In his view, migrants streaming over the border are taking jobs away from Americans. They’re not. Crime, he asserts, is way up. It’s down. The economy, he claims, is in shambles.

The opposite is more accurate. Now, the former president has come up with the idea that countries are avoiding the greenback. The dollar is “under major siege,” the Republican presidential nominee said on Saturday at a rally in Wisconsin. “You leave the dollar and you’re not doing business with the United States because we are going to put a 100% tariff on your goods.”

Also read: ‘100% tariff on your goods’: Donald Trump warns countries that plan to shun dollar

The implication, like most things Trump says these days, is that only he can prevent such a calamity. And it would be a calamity if it were happening—but it’s not.

The dollar is the world’s primary reserve currency, which is the source of the US’s ‘exorbitant privilege,’ which allows the government to fund budget deficits in perpetuity and keeps interest rates lower than they might otherwise be. So, a move away from the dollar by foreign investors would make it harder for the US to borrow, therefore causing borrowing costs to spike.

For those not steeped in the foreign-exchange market, Trump seems to be riffing off the ‘de-dollarization’ speculation that has cropped up lately. The thinking is that the US has ‘weaponized’ the dollar through financial sanctions imposed on Russia, including preventing that country’s central bank from accessing its foreign-currency reserves.

As such, countries whose ideological leanings conflict with those of the US might want to move their reserves into the currency of a more friendly country.

Indeed, when the foreign ministers of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa convened in Cape Town in mid-2023, Bloomberg News reported that they asked the bloc’s specially created bank to provide guidance on how a potential new shared currency might work, including how it could shield member countries from the impact of sanctions such as those imposed on Russia.

It won’t be an easy task. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, use of the dollar in global transactions has only grown, jumping to 47.8% as of July from 38.9%, according to Swift, the member-owned cooperative that provides financial messaging services to more than 10,000 institutions and companies in 210 countries.

Also read: Donald Trump wants to weaken the US dollar: Can he?

A decade ago, the dollar’s share was less than 35%. Clearly, the world sees a benefit in transacting business in a currency where the rule of law takes precedence.

It’s that commitment to the rule of law that draws capital from around the world to the US. Foreign holdings of US Treasury securities have surged by $1.14 trillion since the end of 2020 through June, better than the $1.07 trillion under all four years of Trump.

It’s why the Bloomberg dollar index has strengthened 10.2% under the Biden administration after weakening 11.6% under the Trump administration. It’s why the MSCI USA Index of equities has surged 42% since the end of 2020, almost 17 times the gain of the MSCI All-Country World Index excluding the US.

What Trump conveniently neglects to mention when it comes to the dollar is how much damage was done to it while he was president. Erratic and unpredictable policies, both domestic and foreign, along with periodic threats on the ideals that underpin the rule of law created a crisis of confidence in America as a stable place to invest.

The dollar’s share of global currency reserves tumbled from 65.4% when he took office at the start of 2017 to 60.7% when he left at the end of 2020—which was the lowest since 1995. Under Biden, the dollar’s share of has stabilized, amounting to 58.9% at the end of the first quarter.

Even so, Trump’s ‘100% tariff’ plan on countries that shun the dollar contains a fatal flaw. It’s possible that such prohibitive tariffs could have the opposite of their intended effect and drive the countries away from the greenback, threatening the haven status of US Treasuries and “lead to massive dollar weakness,” Ulrich Leuchtmann, the head of foreign-exchange research at Commerzbank AG, wrote in a research note Monday.

Trump wants to “force dollar dominance. That changes everything,” Leuchtmann wrote. “If the US were to impose prohibitive tariffs across the board, they would cause massive disruption to the global economic system.”

Also read: Who’s afraid of a falling yuan?

Like Don Quixote, who attacked windmills in the mistaken belief that they were wicked giants, Trump is known for assailing imaginary enemies or evils. But at least Quixote, after various humiliations, finally came to realize the folly of his quest and returned home. Trump has yet to reach that point. ©BLOOMBERG