President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Steve Mnuchin in Davos, broke with the long-term tradition of the Treasury Secretary paying lip service to a strong dollar (for obvious reasons), even while those same treasury secretaries privately advocate for shitting all over it because of the perceived short-term political gain of creating false prosperity via rises in prices. ... which nominally makes things look like they are appreciating in value (even though in real terms, people usually find themselves worse off in terms of their standard of living).

Mnuchin outright said that "a weak dollar is good for trade and opportunities," and the recent weakness in the dollar relative to other currencies doesn't concern him at all. The dollar index has been on a steady march down for the last year, despite the Federal Reserve raising their overnight rate a few times, which is a whole other conversation about how little control they have over the monster they created.

I'll assume Mnuchin isn't a complete idiot (a la Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro), so he should be smart enough to know to be careful about what he wishes for. But when the guy you work for says crap over and over again and the shock only lastss half a news cycle, I guess it emboldens everyone else to just say things that inevitably they will regret later on.

And no, that isn't me predicting a dollar crash (before anyone goes there). The dollar has lost its value at a tremendous clip (as has every fiat currency in this environment of money creation), but the dollar index measures the dollar relative to the other dogshit currencies out there, not in terms of the value of a dollar itself in terms of its purchasing power. These kinds of moves have been unpredictable for the last 9 years, because just as you get a handle on one central bank devaluing, another one (which has a currency that is a component in the dollar index) can offset them by devaluing to a greater degree. That is what happens in a currency war. They are wars that people tend to measure from one short-term time period to the next, and only realize later on that everyone was a loser.