Here’s a letter to Semafor. (I add that I nevertheless doubt that Trump understands what he’s saying.)
Editor:
Quoted in “Vance takes his first economic punch in the 2028 primary” (August 21), American Compass’s Oren Cass describes people who don’t share J.D. Vance’s wish that the U.S. dollar lose its role as global reserve currency as members of a “bizarre kind of rump-libertarian right.”
Well now.
Here are six notable people who write or speak favorably of the dollar’s role as global reserve currency. All are prominent, half are center-left, and only one is libertarian.
– Larry Summers (former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton), testified that “if a country or countries decide to adopt the dollar, the United States can expect to benefit in a number of ways.”
– Jason Furman (Chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors) said in an interview that the dollar’s reserve-currency status is a “good thing” from which “we get some benefits from that in terms of lower interest rates, cheaper borrowing, and, you know — and some other benefits in terms of ability to, you know, have a higher living standard.”
– Kenneth Rogoff (Harvard professor and former chief economist at the IMF) declared that “the dominance of the dollar – that it’s used in everything, it’s the lingua franca of the global financial system – benefits us a lot of ways.”
– Milton Friedman (Nobel laureate, 1976) asked rhetorically: “Can you think of a better deal than our getting fine textiles, shiny cars, and sophisticated TV sets for a bale of green printed paper? Or for some entries on the books of banks?”
– Kevin Hassett (Director of the National Economic Council under Trump) testifying before Congress in 2013 noted “that we are in a situation where we can print dollars that cost us nothing, really, to make and then give them to people, and they give us BMWs, say, and because they really want to hold the dollars, and that that is an advantageous position for us to be in.”
– Donald Trump (President of the United States) said in July 2025 that “the reserve currency is so important. You know, if we lost that, that would be like losing a world war.”
This list could easily be extended.
Mr. Cass should do his homework before offering commentary.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
