“If we lose the dollar standard—global dollar standard we have now, it will be as damaging as losing a war,” President Donald Trump announced to reporters at a July 8 Oval Office press conference. The context for that statement was the President’s announcement that he intended to impose a 10% tariff on the members of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) because these nations are threatening the dominance of the U.S. dollar, CNN reported him saying.
“BRICS was set up to hurt us,” Trump argued. “BRICS was set up to degenerate our dollar, to take our dollar—take it off the standard,” and that, he concluded, could be as damaging “as losing a war, as losing a world war.” Trump is wrong that a BRICS currency is under consideration at all.
Why, then, is the President urging on the creation of scores of other, privately branded dollars—so-called stablecoins, which are ersatz U.S. dollars, issued by private tech and financial companies like Tether, Inc. and private banks like Bank of America? Is the need for trillions in new dollar printings to buy the unrolling new trillions in U.S. federal debt, so desperate as to invite currency chaos like that of the 1850s? There was no dollar standard then, not worldwide, and not in the United States.
