US current account deficit: USD devaluation?!

Chart of the Week: America’s current account woes

Tim Baker at Deutsche Bank argues the US’s larger current account deficit relative to other major economies reflects an expensive dollar. But President Donald Trump’s crusade to weaken the dollar and reduce the US’s trade deficit could be a double-edged sword.
“The Trump administration’s effort to narrow the US trade deficit means fewer dollars will flow overseas, reducing the need for those funds to be recycled back into US securities,” notes Elias Haddad at Brown Brothers Harriman. Net portfolio inflows, which have come in at nearly 2 per cent of GDP in the past year, have helped fund the current account deficit, Baker notes.

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How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio - Bridgewater

Source: How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio

Letter: Why the geopolitics of international currency choice matters - FT

This coincidence must alert readers that a tempest is brewing on subjects noted: lurking inflation, increasing debt, suppressed interest rates and the shifting of hegemonic power. There are only two important questions in investing that also apply to subjects impacting the future stability of the world — tell me why and tell me when. Plender gives us the “why”, the ever-increasing “intolerable burden” of government debt and suppressed rates leveraging the global financial system. He gives us the tipping point. What we await is “the when”, as in when do we know we have “tipped”. Paul Hackett Madison, NJ, US Letter: Why the geopolitics of international currency choice matters

Reading the runes on a Warsh Fed - Martin Wolf - Financial Times

Intellectually, at least, today’s Warsh appears the same as the one of 2010. In his IMF lecture delivered in April 2025, he stressed not only the Fed’s “institutional drift”, but also its recent “failure to satisfy an essential part of its statutory remit, price stability. It has also contributed to an explosion of federal spending. And the Fed’s outsized role and underperformance have weakened the important and worthy case for monetary policy independence.” He made other criticisms, the most pointed being that “the Fed has been the most important buyer of US Treasury debt — and other liabilities backed by the US government — since 2008”. He asserts: “Fiscal dominance — where the nation’s debts constrain monetary policymakers — was long thought by economists to be a possible end-state. My view is that monetary dominance — where the central bank becomes the ultimate arbiter of fiscal policy — is the clearer and more present danger.” For Warsh, then, easy money is the road to ruin. ...

Luca Bindi, LL.M.

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