The “Mar-a-Lago” accord for an international devaluation of the U.S. dollar to make America a manufacturing export power again, considered to be directed against China, was put forward by the chairman of President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers Stephen Miran, with a hedge-fund background and education by Martin Feldstein of the National Bureau of Economics Research. Miran’s paper on the path to such an “Accord” required punitive tariffs, especially against China.
On June 4, just before the phone call of Presidents Trump and Xi on the issue of tariffs and trade, Prof. Yao Yang of the China School of Economic Studies at Peking University supported the “Mar-a-Lago Accord” idea in a column on Project Syndicate. Professor Yao proposed that a “reasonable, achievable target would be a one-time appreciation of 15-20%” in China’s renminbi (and that several other nations’ currencies would also be involved and would benefit). And perhaps “China would leverage it to persuade Trump to eliminate the 20% tariff on Chinese goods he introduced during his first term.”
EIR in 2019, in countering Mark Carney’s Jackson Hole speech about dumping the dollar as reserve currency, published the idea of a 15% revaluation of the renminbi against the dollar, in exchange for the elimination of Trump’s original tariffs on China. Carney had maintained that because central banks had been unable to devalue the dollar by means of money-printing and inflation since the 2008 crash, it had to be replaced by a global reserve digital currency controlled by the same, failing central banks.
