I was about to link to something I'd read in Foreign Policy a few days ago until Krugman beat me to the punch:
> I don’t want to overstate the case here. The dollar’s role as the dominant currency for ordinary business is not under threat. A new article in Foreign Policy by Agathe Demarais is titled “China’s de-dollarization drive has hit a wall.” [1]
The headline is this:
> Iran’s ability to withstand American pressure has demonstrated that U.S. sanctions are a lot less effective than in the past given that rogue actors can use the yuan and CIPS as a work-around.
The dollar as an instrument of offensive diplomacy is now weakened, not as the currency of international transaction. That being said Iran's economy isn't exactly doing numbers at the moment so even this caveat has a caveat.
> The dollar as an instrument of offensive diplomacy is now weakened
How strong was it in the first place? Anyone can just accept dollars without worrying they'll be able to spend them - the dollar spends just about anywhere, the US only has control of whether US companies will do business with you.
There have been quite a few countries whose central banking had collapsed, and they decided to just adopt the dollar or euro as currency, to the disapproval of the respective power blocs, but its not like they could do anything about it.
The only risk here is money printing, but that's not a targeted weapon (if its a weapon in the first place)
Paul Krugman is an Economist, but the world is Multi-Dimensional. By using ideologically aligned proxies, Iran was well on its way to subjugate the Middle East and the World to its radical Islamism - the extend of its weapon capabilities undermined demonstratively the security of the entire region. This couldn't last, but Krugman only sees one horse: his hobby horse ...
Someone needs to make an inverse Krugman index like the one they did for Jim Cramer.
You could make an argument that the Yuan could be an alternative to USD as a mechanism of international payments, but you ignore the danger of working in a currency controlled by a country with no rule of law.
Krugman is so blinded by Trump hatred that he can't be objective. You dont have to be a MAGA person to see this post is terribly stilted.
The casual disregard of international treaties and responsibilities coupled by the arbitrary tariffs and other economic actions makes the us untrustworthy and unpredictable. Countries hate the former and business hate the latter. Therefore, if the us can be avoided it will be.
I DO hate him, and still find this black and white thinking unsettling, though not uncommon. Has all of the western world completely surrendered to the nuance void?
s/subject/object - there's no objective standard for hatred. I find it funny that Trump was pretty much universally liked until he ran for President as a Republican. If you go back to his interviews in the 80's and 90's, he's pretty much saying now what he said back then, so what changed?
In the 1990s he said he was very pro-choice. That's changed.
In some more fundamental sense, you are right - he hasn't changed that much. Doonesbury, 16 September 1987 characterized him as "I'm just a billionaire developer exercising trial balloons! If I were running [for President] though, it'd be as an original, as a beloved archetype - the American Landlord!" https://readingdoonesbury.com/2018/06/01/selling-reagan-to-b...
You couldn't have read Doonesbury at the time without knowing that a lot of people didn't like Trump, but did things for him because of his money.
Certainly some people did like him. Some of those trial balloons went over really well with racists, like the malicious Central Park 5 ad. ("even a fool can become a multi-millionaire." and 'Trump "was the fire starter" in 1989, as "common citizens were being manipulated and swayed into believing that we were guilty."' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case ).
As one of the examples of how we know a lot of people didn't like the short fingered vulgarian, here's a 50 second piece featured in "Alive from Off Center" in 1991, starting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY7pKQ-Imco&t=559 and ending with the assertion that names like Donald Trump ("a man who can buy his cake and eat it too") "are just fancy names for irrelevance".
IMO what changed is the economic insecurity as the New Deal and Great Society were torn down from the rise of neoliberal thought in the 1970s, funded by rich reactionaries who want to return to a pre-New Deal America, and embraced by both major parties who are more beholden to rich donors than the electorate. As President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." That continues to be used to redirect anger towards minorities, instead of at the rich people, and Trump, as you point out, has for decades been a master at picking that pocket.
I was about to link to something I'd read in Foreign Policy a few days ago until Krugman beat me to the punch:
> I don’t want to overstate the case here. The dollar’s role as the dominant currency for ordinary business is not under threat. A new article in Foreign Policy by Agathe Demarais is titled “China’s de-dollarization drive has hit a wall.” [1]
The headline is this:
> Iran’s ability to withstand American pressure has demonstrated that U.S. sanctions are a lot less effective than in the past given that rogue actors can use the yuan and CIPS as a work-around.
The dollar as an instrument of offensive diplomacy is now weakened, not as the currency of international transaction. That being said Iran's economy isn't exactly doing numbers at the moment so even this caveat has a caveat.
[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/24/china-dollar-dedollariz...
Perhaps it is the use of the dollar as an instrument of offensive diplomacy that is weakening it.
Economic sanctions used to be rare, between 2000 and 2021 they grew by 1000% and the list is something like 17,000 entities long.
Is USD still a currency or is it now more like Robux: Swiftly confiscated if you violate the TOS?
> The dollar as an instrument of offensive diplomacy is now weakened
How strong was it in the first place? Anyone can just accept dollars without worrying they'll be able to spend them - the dollar spends just about anywhere, the US only has control of whether US companies will do business with you.
There have been quite a few countries whose central banking had collapsed, and they decided to just adopt the dollar or euro as currency, to the disapproval of the respective power blocs, but its not like they could do anything about it.
The only risk here is money printing, but that's not a targeted weapon (if its a weapon in the first place)
Paul Krugman is an Economist, but the world is Multi-Dimensional. By using ideologically aligned proxies, Iran was well on its way to subjugate the Middle East and the World to its radical Islamism - the extend of its weapon capabilities undermined demonstratively the security of the entire region. This couldn't last, but Krugman only sees one horse: his hobby horse ...
Someone needs to make an inverse Krugman index like the one they did for Jim Cramer.
You could make an argument that the Yuan could be an alternative to USD as a mechanism of international payments, but you ignore the danger of working in a currency controlled by a country with no rule of law.
Krugman is so blinded by Trump hatred that he can't be objective. You dont have to be a MAGA person to see this post is terribly stilted.
The weakening of the dollar is intentional by this administration. See e.g. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg/programs/growthpol...
What an L take.
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The casual disregard of international treaties and responsibilities coupled by the arbitrary tariffs and other economic actions makes the us untrustworthy and unpredictable. Countries hate the former and business hate the latter. Therefore, if the us can be avoided it will be.
I DO hate him, and still find this black and white thinking unsettling, though not uncommon. Has all of the western world completely surrendered to the nuance void?
The "western world" has a fairly strict moral compass in the sense that you can't uncross certain lines. There isn't nuance to this situation.
s/subject/object - there's no objective standard for hatred. I find it funny that Trump was pretty much universally liked until he ran for President as a Republican. If you go back to his interviews in the 80's and 90's, he's pretty much saying now what he said back then, so what changed?
He was so universally liked that the bad guy in Back to the Future was inspired by him.
That man has never been universally liked, surely you don't actually think this is true?
How did you come to that conclusion?
Were you alive and in the Northeast US during the 80s and 90s, if not, what are your sources?
In the 1990s he said he was very pro-choice. That's changed.
In some more fundamental sense, you are right - he hasn't changed that much. Doonesbury, 16 September 1987 characterized him as "I'm just a billionaire developer exercising trial balloons! If I were running [for President] though, it'd be as an original, as a beloved archetype - the American Landlord!" https://readingdoonesbury.com/2018/06/01/selling-reagan-to-b...
You couldn't have read Doonesbury at the time without knowing that a lot of people didn't like Trump, but did things for him because of his money.
Certainly some people did like him. Some of those trial balloons went over really well with racists, like the malicious Central Park 5 ad. ("even a fool can become a multi-millionaire." and 'Trump "was the fire starter" in 1989, as "common citizens were being manipulated and swayed into believing that we were guilty."' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case ).
As one of the examples of how we know a lot of people didn't like the short fingered vulgarian, here's a 50 second piece featured in "Alive from Off Center" in 1991, starting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY7pKQ-Imco&t=559 and ending with the assertion that names like Donald Trump ("a man who can buy his cake and eat it too") "are just fancy names for irrelevance".
IMO what changed is the economic insecurity as the New Deal and Great Society were torn down from the rise of neoliberal thought in the 1970s, funded by rich reactionaries who want to return to a pre-New Deal America, and embraced by both major parties who are more beholden to rich donors than the electorate. As President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." That continues to be used to redirect anger towards minorities, instead of at the rich people, and Trump, as you point out, has for decades been a master at picking that pocket.
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