‘We’re Not Going to be the Big Boy’: Trump Warns US Dollar’s Power ‘Waning’ Globally
17:33 GMT 17.08.2023 (Updated: 18:22 GMT 17.08.2023)
© AP Photo / Andrew Harnik
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Former US President Donald Trump is the latest figure to warn that the days of the US dollar’s predominance in world trade could soon be numbered.
"Our country is going to hell and we're not going to be the big boy," Trump said during a televised interview on Thursday.
"We have power, but it's waning. In fact, it's waning in terms of our currency. And I'm not just talking about the value of our currency, I'm talking about our currency being used throughout the world."
The impact of the decline of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency is "bigger than losing any war,” Trump asserted.
"You look at our airports, you look at our terminals, you look at our filthy roads and broken roads and everything else, we're like a Third World country," Trump said.
"We have something that's very powerful and that's our dollar. But you take a look at what's happening to it now with other countries not using it, and you know China wants to replace it with the yuan, and it was unthinkable with us. Unthinkable. Would never have happened. Now people are thinking about it,” Trump added.
Major moves have been made in the last year by countries around the globe towards de-centering their economies on the US dollar, including adopting other currencies as modes of exchange and buying up other currencies to change the balance of their reserves away from being so heavily dependent on the US dollar.
Earlier this year, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva acknowledged that many nations were "thinking of an alternative" to the US dollar, possibly in the form of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) like those rolled out by Russia and China in the months since, but said she didn't see an alternative "coming any time soon."
Others, such as Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Pankin, Iran's envoy to Moscow, Kazem Jalali, and Bolivian Economy Minister Marcelo Montenegro, have anticipated much quicker shifting away from the US dollar, thanks to US sanctions blocking many countries from buying key assets, such as gas, coal, fertilizers, and electronic devices, from countries like Russia and China.
The former US leader has mounted a renewed bid for the presidency in 2024 after having failed to stay in office in 2020, when he lost the election to now-US President Joe Biden. Trump is presently leading the pack in popularity not only among Republican candidates for the party’s presidential nomination, but also compared to Democratic challengers to Biden as well.
A major theme of his 2020 and 2024 campaigns has been that only he holds the keys to halting and reversing the United States’ decline, as summarized in his trademark slogan “Make America Great Again.” He has cast Biden’s presidency as having spoiled the gains made during his four previous years in power.
In his interview, Trump blamed Biden’s energy policy for the rising cost of living and inflation of the dollar, saying that Biden curbing oil drilling on federal land and offshore was “so sad.”
"Inflation was caused, in my opinion, by energy, because it's so big," Trump said. "It's like all encompassing, everything. You make donuts in the ovens and the trucks that deliver them, and no matter what you do, it's so much about energy."
"They cut it off, and again, we were drilling much more. We were a bigger force than Russia and Saudi Arabia individually," he continued. "In a year and a half, we would have been a bigger force than them combined and we would have made so much money. We would have been paying off debt, we would have been doing things that nobody's ever seen this country do."
