The Triffin Dilemma Unfolds

In the 1960’s, economist Robert Triffin noted that global reserve currencies have to run large persistent trade deficits, which has been coined the Triffin Dilemma. If the reserve country doesn’t supply the world with a lot of their currency, then the world simply can’t use that currency for international trade, commodity

The first and largest dollar spike occurred in the mid-1980’s. From the 1970’s and into the early 1980’s, the U.S. dollar encountered serious devaluation and inflation, so Fed Chairman Paul Volcker hiked interest rates up to the double digits to stabilize the dollar and force inflation back down. This, however, made the real interest rate on the

Emerging markets as we currently know them didn’t exist during the 1980’s dollar spike. The MSCI Emerging Market Index was created shortly afterward in 1987, and it was a small share of global GDP at the time. Developing countries of course existed during this dollar spike, but just weren’t significant players in the dollar market. So, this 1980’s

The strength or weakness of the U.S. dollar is very important for global growth, including S&P 500 earnings growth. A stronger dollar generally impedes growth, while a weaker dollar boosts it.

And it continues to grow; the United States is running large deficits (5% of GDP) during a period of low unemployment for the first time since the Vietnam War. In other words, we now have significant structural government budget deficits rather than just temporary cyclical/recession deficits:

While the strong dollar gives U.S. consumers more buying/importing power, it makes U.S. products and services more expensive, and thus less competitive in the export market. Basically, it helps some groups live above their means (and U.S. asset prices have been doing great), but it hollows out the U.S. manufacturing sector and negatively affects

The U.S. housing and banking system was the epicenter of the global financial crisis in 2008, and the Fed used a few rounds of quantitative easing (i.e. expanding the monetary base to buy U.S. government debt and other securities) in the aftermath, which kept its currency relatively weak due to plentiful supply.

When the United States finished its

Why Each Time is Worse

Each of these three dollar spikes over the past five decades caused harm to the global financial system at a lower level of dollar strength than the previous spike, resulting in either a planned correction or a self-correction towards a weaker dollar. There are likely two main reasons for this.

Firstly, global trade accounted

Imagine, as an extreme example, that the entire world had to use Swiss francs for its international transactions and commodity purchases. It simply wouldn’t work, because there isn’t enough money supply from that small country for the whole world to use. It’s not liquid enough; there aren’t enough francs.

The current system is running into that