by Lifted from comments by PGL: The dollar has devalued since Trump became President: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TWEXB Barry Eichengreen has some interesting thoughts here: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/what-explains-dollar-weakness-by-barry-eichengreen-2018-03 “One of the big ones in the circles I frequent is dollar weakness. Between January 2017 and January 2018, the broad effective exchange rate of the dollar fell by 8%, wrong-footing many of the pundits. I include myself among the wrong-footed (others can decide whether I qualify as a pundit). Tax cuts and interest-rate normalization, I expected, would shift the mix toward looser fiscal and tighter monetary policies, the combination that drove up the dollar in the Reagan-Volcker
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Lifted from comments by PGL:
The dollar has devalued since Trump became President:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TWEXB
Barry Eichengreen has some interesting thoughts here:
“One of the big ones in the circles I frequent is dollar weakness. Between January 2017 and January 2018, the broad effective exchange rate of the dollar fell by 8%, wrong-footing many of the pundits. I include myself among the wrong-footed (others can decide whether I qualify as a pundit). Tax cuts and interest-rate normalization, I expected, would shift the mix toward looser fiscal and tighter monetary policies, the combination that drove up the dollar in the Reagan-Volcker years. Tax changes encouraging US corporations to repatriate their profits would unleash a wave of capital inflows, pushing up the dollar still further. New tariffs that made imports more costly and that shifted demand toward domestic goods would require offsetting effects in a near-full-employment economy in order to shift demand back to foreign sources. The most plausible such offset was, of course, appreciation of the real exchange rate, which could occur only through inflation or, more plausibly, a stronger dollar. The markets, in their wisdom, rejected this logic for more than a year.”
With this market rejection, he revisits:
“The most popular explanation for dollar weakness is that Trump, through incompetence or misdirection, failed to deliver what he promised. There was no across-the-board import tariff. There was no abrogation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. There was no $1 trillion infrastructure package. But there were, in fact, deep tax cuts. There were, in fact, interest-rate hikes by the Federal Reserve. And there were, in fact, tax changes creating incentives for the repatriation of profits. Other things equal, these developments should have propped up the dollar. So there must be more to its weakening than just Trump’s failure to deliver. Another popular explanation is that investors expected the real exchange rate to rise through inflation rather than currency appreciation. The dollar weakened, in this view, because the Fed fell behind the curve and risked losing control of the inflation process.”
There is much more to this thoughtful post!