Who benefits from a global dollar?

[LONDON] US President Donald Trump thinks America is only for Americans. The US dollar, by contrast, is for everyone. Should the Brics grouping of emerging economies create a new currency, Trump has tweeted, or “back any other currency to replace the mighty US dollar”, they will face 100 per cent tariffs.

The chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, Stephen Miran, disagrees. On Apr 7, he told the Hudson Institute that the global use of the dollar has “caused persistent currency distortions and contributed, along with other countries’ unfair barriers to trade, to unsustainable trade deficits”.

Miran is not the only Maga (“Make America Great Again”) economist to hold that view. Michael Pettis, not of the administration but influential within it, recently wrote a commentary in the Financial Times titled The US would be better off without the global dollar.