[nemothekid]

>Does anyone else have the sickening feeling that their actual plan is to straight up destroy USD

Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Trump, is pretty much trying to do this. He published 'A User's Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System', and it pretty much outlines why they should destroy the USD - in order to bring manufacturing home, so that the warhawks will no longer have any reason to not start a war with China

[suraci]

I like Stephen Miran, I always like people who are (relatively) honest

> CEA Chairman Steve Miran Hudson Institute Event Remarks

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/04/cea-...

[mindslight]

It's a bit of a stretch to call this juxtaposition of topics, with absolutely zero analysis of how they're connected, honest:

> we tax hardworking Americans mightily to finance global security. On the financial side, the reserve function of the dollar has caused persistent currency distortions and contributed, along with other countries’ unfair barriers to trade, to unsustainable trade deficits.

Money is fungible between these two concerns. The excess demand for USD is a source of revenue for our economic empire, realized by the continual monetary inflation without nearly as much corresponding price inflation. Some of that monetary inflation has been used by the government (~"deficit spending"), but the sheer majority has been getting dumped into the financial industry to bid up existing assets as a handout to the rich. That is what has left the American worker high and dry - near complete inability for the US government to use that already-centralized revenue to help wider society, due to a political movement based around fake austerity.

The article continues on using the passive voice to describe multiple things that the US government could have put a stop to any time it wanted, framed as if they were being done to us by other countries. For example:

> in the years running up to the 2008 crash, China along with many foreign financial institutions, increased their holdings of U.S. mortgage debt, which helped fuel the housing bubble, forcing hundreds of billions of dollars of credit into the housing sector without regard as to whether the investments made sense

Obviously if the government had set interest rates higher rather than lower, there would have been fewer mortgage bonds to buy and the dollars would have had to go elsewhere. I don't know if this pattern is deliberate or just an inevitable result of the bizzarro framing where having the world reserve currency is asserted to be a liability, but either way it is most certainly not honest.

[suraci]

(relatively)

I call this kind of nonsense that can be seen through at a glance an 'relatively honest lie'

those lines you quoted are nonsense that can be totally ignored without misunderstanding his point, those lines are like something as "get schwifty"

> Second, they can get schwifty by opening their markets and buying more from America

> Fifth, they could simply write checks to Treasury that help us get schwifty

[mindslight]

SMH, the mental contortions people will go through to rationalize and whitewash the actions of this administration. You're either honest or you're not. There's no such thing as honest if people just read every third sentence and invent their own meanings for the rest. That's called dishonest.

But even accepting your point for the sake of discussion, he is "honestly" doing what? Begging? How is that a good thing?

[nemothekid]

I don't think this is a matter of like or disliking someone. While I can appreciate his candor in what he's trying to do - just because he's "honest" doesn't mean I agree with his policy.

What he is effectively saying is that large swaths of the American populace need to accept lower economic strength in order to decouple our reliance on our trading partners. And his reason for doing so is so that we can wage war on them. It's a completely nonsensical approach to maintain American hegemony. Why would any prefer strength through violence rather than maintaining the current system of American hegemony through trade?

While reserve currency status has it's warts, especially like he points out, the absolute immense amount of demand for US debt which fuels an uncontrolled spending crisis domestically I believe that is 1000% preferable to my daughters working in factories, and my sons dying in the Taiwan strait? For what? So that maybe the US can forcibly bomb China back into a nation of poor farmers and claim ideological victory over the communist project? It's completely inane.

You need to go one step further and ask yourself why he's proposing this. Instead of reexamining our relationship with China and asking ourselves how can we win in a multi-polar future, Miran and Trump have taken the view that China must remain a global adversary and we must maintain some sort of leverage on them.