President Trump’s Legal Tender

The president-elect announces that he will start twisting arms to keep the Brics countries from fleeing the ‘mighty’ American dollar.

Maxim Shipenkov, pool via AP
Presidents Xi and Putin attend a family photo ceremony during the Brics Summit at Kazan, Russia, October 24, 2024. Maxim Shipenkov, pool via AP

The latest news on the monetary front is that President-elect Trump is warning that he will start twisting arms to keep Brazil, Russia, India, Communist China, and other Brics countries from fleeing the dollar. The leader of the free world, Bloomberg reports, says that he wants the greenback to remain the globe’s reserve currency. He’s threatening to slap wayward countries with tariffs of — wait for it —100 percent if they abandon the “mighty” dollar.

That’s mighty ironical. If the dollar were so all-fired mighty, after all, why would America need to go around threatening countries for trying a different currency? When we were last members of a proper monetary system — Bretton Woods — the dollar was valued at a 35th of an ounce of gold. Today it can’t fetch a 2,600th of an ounce of the monetary metal. That means that in open trading the greenback has shed more than 99 percent of its value in specie.

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