For better than three decades, the U.S. has been in an enviable position of trading new financial claims for foreign manufactured goods. The U.S. has literally flooded the world with dollar balances. In the process, the U.S. exported Credit Bubble Dynamics (including financial innovation and central bank doctrine) to the world. When the central bank to the world’s reserve currency actively inflates, the entire world is welcome to inflate. The resulting global monetary disorder ensured a world of fundamentally vulnerable currencies.
Despite unrelenting Current Account Deficits, there have been two distinct “king dollar” episodes. There was the “king dollar” period of the late-nineties, fueled by global financial instability, a U.S. edge in technology and, importantly, the Greenspan Fed’s competitive advantage in sustaining U.S. securities market inflation. More recently, a resurgent “king dollar” was winning by default in 2013-2016, as the ECB, BOJ and others implemented massive “whatever it takes” QE and rate programs. Moreover, the shale revolution and a dramatic reduction in oil imports was to improve the U.S. trade position. Oil imports did shrink dramatically, but this was easily offset by American consumers’ insatiable appetite for imported goods.
