TRUMPONOMICS
AND THE STRONG DOLLAR, by Ruben Alvarado | On January 25, 2017
Since the November
election results, markets have been gaining – so much so that the big Wall
Street trading firms booked eye-popping earnings in the fourth quarter.
“Citigroup’s $3.7
billion trading haul was its
best fourth-quarter showing
since the financial crisis. J.P.
Morgan Chase &
Co., which reported its
results last week,
had its best fourth-quarter for trading ever,” reports
the Wall Street Journal.
The reason? According
to this same article, the prospect of rising interest rates and “confidence
that President-Elect Donald Trump’s policies will spur the economy.”
In particular, the
prospect of reduced corporate taxation has markets in an upbeat mood. The
expectation is that billions of dollars held overseas will start finding their
way back into the country, taking advantage of the improved investment climate.
Such an influx of money
from abroad, whether it’s being repatriated or it constitutes a fresh inflow
from foreign investors, has the effect of increasing demand for dollars. This
boosts the dollar’s exchange rate.
Supposedly, this is good
news. The vast majority of commentators in general view a strengthening
currency, and in particular a strong dollar, as a boon. An unsigned editorial in the Wall Street Journal
argues that a strong dollar policy historically has gone together with a strong
economy, as was the case with Reagan and Clinton, while a weak dollar policy
has accompanied a weak economy, as with Nixon, Carter, George W. Bush, and
Obama.
Although this particular
editorial makes many dubious assertions, the main thrust of it is the claim
that Mr. Trump’s recent statements emphasizing the undesirability
of a strong dollar is simply another bit of evidence that he shoots from the
hip, says things without thinking, and really doesn’t understand that a strong
economy of necessity fuels dollar appreciation. Like other presidents, he
should leave pronunciations about the dollar’s exchange rate to his Treasury
secretary.
The point that the
editorial makes, that a strong economy leads to a strong dollar, is not the
point it is trying to make, that a strong dollar leads to a strong economy. The
latter is precisely what must be demonstrated rather than asserted. And it
leads us to re-evaluate whether or not Mr. Trump is shooting from the hip in a
wild and unthinking fashion.
For it forgets a
cornerstone of Trumponomics, as articulated on the stump ad nauseum throughout
the campaign, which is that there can be no economic restoration without a
rectification of global trade imbalances, of which the US trade deficit is the
most glaring manifestation.
It is easy for the Wall
Street Journal to say
that, during the Reagan years, “[while] extended dollar strength did hurt some
U.S. companies against foreign competition, and the U.S. ran a large trade
deficit…. The boom continued, and except for a shallow recession in the early
1990s the economy sustained a strong dollar and strong growth for many more
years.”
Yes, GDP figures
superficially may have been strong, but under the surface, as we have outlined
in previous articles, [1] the entire manufacturing base was being
packed up and shipped overseas. For thanks to the strong dollar policy, the US
not only ran a large trade deficit, it kept
running a large trade deficit, and continues
to do so to
this day.
This ongoing,
year-in-year-out trade deficit is the telltale sign that we are living beyond
our means, paying for our consumption not by equivalent production, but by
debt.
This, not strong
economic growth, is the legacy of the strong dollar policy. Is it pursued out
of hubris, out of blindness, or simply at the behest of our friends, the
Transnational Capitalist Class? Be that as it may, it is the background to Mr.
Trump’s statement regarding the undesirability of a strong dollar.
Trump knows that the
dollar rally may signal strong economic growth in the short term, but in the
long term it will keep the necessary rebalancing of the global economy from
taking place, and in that all the efforts at relocating jobs and rebuilding
manufacturing capacity will have gone for naught.
Originally published on Common Law Investing.
http://affluentinvestor.com/2017/01/trumponomics-strong-dollar/
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