Dale T Mathews-Creque

I've taught international economics at the graduate level and can attest to the difficulties one has as a teacher in effectively conveying how this convoluted system works to students. However, in order to understand the implications of Trump's policies, you have no choice but to (try to) learn something about the system. A good place for the layman to start is with the following introductory video:

You can find a transcript of the above video HERE.

Along with American professor of finance Michael Pettis of the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University, I believe that “Both the United States and the world at large would benefit from a less dominant U.S. dollar”, although I have my own reasons. You can find Prof. Pettis's work cited in THIS article (scroll down to the heading Are there costs to dollar dominance?).

What about President Donald Trump's current tariff policies, which seem to have the world in such a state of chaos? I came across the following "tweet" by an economist the other day: {the} US tariff agenda is basically designed to cause a negotiated dollar weakening; (now WH chief economist), gave a speech yesterday which basically suggested that reserve status for dollar was a burden which others might need to 'write checks' for. Intrigued, I did an online search which turned up THIS article on the Trump administration's tariffs and currency policy. Aside from my personal animus toward the militarism of the United States, the supremacy of the US dollar is counterproductive if the intention is to bring back manufacturing investment to the USA. Economist Simon Tilford and researcher Hans Kundnani are succinct in their aptly titled article for Foreign Affairs:

Dollar hegemony ... has domestic distributional consequences - that is, it creates winners and losers within the USA. The main winners are the banks which act as intermediaries and recipients of the capital inflows and that exercise excessive influence over US economic policy. The losers are the manufacturers and the workers they employ. Demand for the dollar pushes up its value, which makes US exports more expensive and curtails demand for them abroad, thus leading to earnings and job losses in manufacturing. The costs have been borne disproportionately by swing states in regions such as the rust-belt - a consequence that in turn has deepened socioeconomic divisions and fueled political polarization. Manufacturing jobs that were once central to the economies of these regions have been offshored, leaving poverty and resentment in their wake. It is little surprise that many of the hardest-hit states voted for Trump in 2016.

Despite being behind a pay-wall the entire Foreign Affairs article is worthwhile. It was published in 2020 and is prescient, giving badly needed context to what is happening today. Further on it states:

The domestic costs of accumulating large capital flows are likely to increase and become more destabilizing for the US in the future. As China and other emerging economies continue to grow and the US's slice of the global economy continues to shrink, capital inflows to the US will grow relative to the size of the US economy (...)  Given these mounting economic and political pressures, it will become increasingly difficult for the US to create more balanced and equitable growth while remaining the destination of choice for the world's excess capital, with the overvalued currency and deindustrialization this implies. At some point, the US will have little alternative but to limit capital imports in the interests of the broader economy - even if doing so means voluntarily giving up the dollar's role as the world's dominant reserve currency.

If you would prefer avoid the pay-wall, perhaps the following video will be more to your liking. It takes on the issue of President Trump's tariffs head-on:

A more "bricks and mortar" treatment of the topic of the difficulties of enticing manufacturing back to the United States is provided by Molson Hart, the founder and CEO of Viahart, a consumer products company, HERE.