[juniperus]

The superpower built on the US dollar fiat monopoly that was enforced by military lead? The one that Trump is trying to reassert in a misguided attempt at preventing a decline in US quality of life down to a more realistic level? You seem to think Trump is the cause of this, and not the world gaining the ability to dictate their own affairs and not be the victim of CIA global chess games and other neocolonialist machinations. Trump is just a symptom of the backlash among the American public unable to adapt to the increasingly clear reality of the loss of purchasing power that is downstream of the rise in non-American economies and their productivity. But yeah, I guess if you view things simply, all of this started in 2016, and hasn't been brewing for decades and decades since the post-ww2 order was obviously not the end of history as once believed lol.

[kelseyfrog]

US financiers enjoy the benefits of the global dollar, and have immense political influence.

What's completely incomprehensible is that the people suffering consequences of the Triffin Dilemma double down on the US dollar as the reserve currency. If they really wanted to bring back manufacturing, jobs, and compete with China, we'd give up the dollars special status. It's amazing how easily it is to misdirect blame to immigrants, libs, etc. Absolutely wild.

[mindslight]

> If they really wanted to bring back manufacturing, jobs, and compete with China, we'd give up the dollars special status

IIUC that was actually an explicit goal laid out in Ron Vara's book. It's obviously hard to tell where the line is between deliberate policy and mere narrative-chum for useful idiots to latch on to. But the impression I've gotten is that many of Grump's moves are in line with this goal, but fail to achieve it because the Dollar is so damn sticky (at least in the near term).

Also, the truth is that supporting manufacturing jobs to compete with China could always have been straightforwardly done by taking the surplus wealth gained by being the world reserve currency (ie being able to trade paper dollars for real goods), and directly spending it on subsidies for domestic manufacturing. But the policy over the past several decades has been instead to simply give away that wealth to Wall Street in the form of artificially low interest rates that create an asset bubble (ie the fake "fiscal responsibility" that the Republican party had been promoting)