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I've been wondering the same thing about their lowering their dollar but I'm not sure that they (Trump & Admin) fully grasp that they are playing with a wicked fire called inflation that has the ability to kneecap them, coupled with the rising costs of imports.Gotta watch the base rate fallacy on that one. Trade has been such an utter gong show that month by month just doesn’t help much.there have been wild swings as tariffs come and go, and as companies leverage windows of “we know the rules for the rest of this week” to lay in inventories.
US imports are little changed if you look at a smoothed out 3-5 year, and exports have continued to grow modestly but at apparently the same or a similar rate to before.
Interestingly the value of the U.S. dollar as measured by the DXY currency basket index is down about 11% in the past year. It’s even now showing a slip against the Canadian dollar, which til recently had been sliding with it but is now gaining in relative value. Our dollar is up 6.5% in the past 12 months against USD.
I have no feel for if the U.S. is deliberately weakening their own dollar to discourage imports and encourage exports.
Here's a decent explanation of what Morgan Stanley identified back in Aug about this issue, and, since then, the USD has fallen further.
Key Takeaways from the article:
- The value of the U.S. dollar against other currencies dropped about 11% in the first half of this year, the biggest decline in more than 50 years, ending a 15-year bull cycle.
- Morgan Stanley Research estimates the U.S. currency could lose another 10% by the end of 2026.
- Despite a recovery of 3.2% in July, the delayed impact of tariffs on growth and unemployment – besides policy uncertainties – are likely to keep negative pressure on the dollar.
- Foreign investors have been adding hedges to their exposure to U.S. assets, which will likely further weaken the dollar.
Adding a link on the US Interest Expense and Interest Rates info page. The US will pay over 1$ TRILLION USD on just the interest on their Federal Debt this year. That works out to be roughly 3.2% of their GDP. In terms of Federal government spending - in5 years interest on the debt will account for 15.6% of Federal expenses....
To give a comparison with us.....total Federal & Provincial interest costs (the US numbers don't include state debt, which typically is substantially lower than Provincial debt), are just over 85$ billion CAD a yearly - using a factor of 9 for population differences, it works out to be about 765$ billion a year in interest payments. In terms of a GDP ratio, by 2029 ours will be about 2.1% - 50% less than the US's now vs 3yrs into the future.
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