Un Little more than a hundred days after its entry into office, it is easy to characterize the tactic of Donald Trump: like a card player, he combines brutal provocations and reversals, to end up concluding deals. It is more difficult to discern its strategy, as it is confused, but it appears more and more clearly that it will ask its compatriots to endure sacrifices on behalf of the tomorrows that sing. As for his war goals, they remain nebulous. Does he want a weak dollar, to reindustrialize, or a strong dollar, to easily finance the deficits of the American economy, and to ensure that it remains financially dominant? This is a central question, and the answers provided to it remain, at this stage, incoherent.
Let's start with the facts. The global economy is today organized around a dominant manufacturing center, China, and a dominant financial center, the United States. As recalled the economist Richard Baldwin in 2024China today represents almost a third of world industry (29 %, if we reason in value), far ahead of the United States (16 %). It has the only complete industrial system and dominates international value chains.
The United States, on the other hand, is financially and monetically archimpreated. The dollar counts for about 60 % of the global financial system, according to the indicators selected, against around 20 % for the euro and a tiny fraction for other currencies. It is on the basis of these facts that must be reasoned.
Loss of economic substance
This system has long worked, for two reasons: on the one hand, the financial attractiveness of the United States and the role of reserve currency of the dollar allowed the country to finance a persistent external deficit; On the other hand, the yield gap between active and external passive avoided that the accumulation of deficits will result in a marked degradation of the net external position. As economists observed Pierre-Olivier Gourchas and Hélène Rey In 2005, the American economy thus played, by getting into low rate to place in remunerative assets, the role of a global venture capital fund.
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Source: Lemonde