President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he has no problem with the sharp decline in the dollar that’s been triggered by convulsions in global bond markets and growing skepticism about the U.S.’s reliability as a trading partner.
“I think it’s great,” Trump told reporters in Iowa when asked about the currency’s decline. “Look at the business we’re doing. The dollar’s doing great.”
Trump has long maintained that a weaker currency helps industries that he’s seeking to boost — particularly manufacturers, but also oil and gas. And U.S. corporations that export goods and services abroad typically report stronger earnings when they can convert foreign payments into a weaker greenback.
Is my smooth brain processing this correctly?
He wants a dollar to be less valuable so that a company can convert their foreign sales into “more” US currency, saying “hey look, because of Trump I made $1billion” but that $1 billion is actually only as valuable as $500 million would have been? So we can all go “hur dur big numba good good!”
Is that it?
It’s the same logic that says that paying off the national day is easy all you have to do is hyperinflate the dollar and then you can pay it off by selling one sandwich
The thing is, that billion dollar is worth a billion dollars of stuff. A weak currency is not the same as inflation. It’s just the value of your currency compared to all the other currencies.
If you are doing manufacturing, then having a weak currency is good. You buy raw materials locally, you take those abroad and sell them, and then you have more US dollars to buy raw materials again.
If you’re importing, though, then the opposite is true. You prefer a strong currency. The USA currently imports more than it exports.
Giving the boffins in the White House the benefit of the doubt, maybe they want to strengthen the manufacturing industry within the USA? They are losing pretty badly to China on that front. (China intentionally keeps its currency weak for this purpose, BTW). It’s pretty clear that the USA wants a war with China, but that’s pretty difficult to supply if you can’t actually make anything locally.
Ha, I’d say to try not to align anything he does with logic - you will likely not be able to make much of a connection, unfortunately. Your smooth brain processing still isn’t smooth enough to be at their level.
Damn, I’m still not stupid enough to comprehend their greatness lol
He’s just pushing for whatever Putin tells him to do.
I mean it can be a valid strategy to gain ‘market share’ in the world. China does this successfully. This is good for big exporting companies and sucks for the population regarding buying imported goods.
Because China basically produces everything, the Chinese can simply buy domestic products to offset the negative effect.
But yeah for a country like the USA, which doesn’t produce nearly as much this will just suck. Imported goods will be more expensive (even more so with the genius tariffs) without the option to buy domestic goods because there simply are none.
Perhaps the idea is to stimulate local manufacturing? But I don’t really see a reason why they wouldn’t just explicitly tell us that if that is the case.
Yeah, but don’t worry, they defeated inflation!
Except that the company does make actual profit from the declining value of its employees’ salaries.