If you asked the Treasury secretary his view of the dollar, the answer would be equally rote: “A strong dollar is in the interest of the United States.” Those words have been so standard<br />that when Paul O’Neill deviated from it in an interview with a German newspaper in 2001, he caused a kerfuffle in global currency markets and quickly backtracked.<br />You look at what China’s doing, you look at what Japan has done over the years — they played the<br />money market, they played the devaluation market, and we sit there like a bunch of dummies.”<br />Taking the president’s words at face value, we would seem to be in for a deliberate effort by the administration to reduce the value of<br />the United States currency relative to its neighbors, in hopes of giving U. S. exporters an advantage and reducing the trade deficit.<br />“The currency is very, very strong, and what you see is people from all over the world wanting<br />to invest in the U. S. currency,” Mr. Mnuchin said in his confirmation hearing.<br />The Trump Team’s Message Is Garbled -<br />Get the Upshot in your Inbox<br />For a very long time, if you asked United States government officials their view<br />on the value of the dollar, they would almost certainly decline to answer.
