You could do a better job as president

Even I could. I didn't use to think that, but that was before we got Donald Trump.

Here are some excerpts from a New York Times article back in July 2016, lamenting how little he knows about global trade. And apparently, he hasn't learned anything since then. Nobody's drawing pictures for him, I guess.

It’s not that trade deficits (and the capital inflows that are their flip side) don’t matter — but just knowing the numbers doesn’t tell you much about whether they are good, bad or indifferent.

Wouldn’t it be better if the U.S. didn’t run a deficit?

It’s not clear that that’s even an option, because the dollar isn’t used just in trade between the United States and other countries.

The dollar is a global reserve currency, meaning that it is used around the world in transactions that have nothing to do with the United States. When a Malaysian company does business with a German company, in many cases it will do business in dollars; when wealthy people in Dubai or Singapore’s government investment fund want to sock away money, they do so in large part in dollar assets.

That creates upward pressure on the dollar for reasons unrelated to trade flows between the United States and its partners. That, in turn, makes the dollar stronger, and American exporters less competitive, than they would be in a world where nobody used the dollar for anything except commerce involving the United States.

The roughly $500 billion trade deficit that the United States runs each year isn’t just about poorly negotiated trade deals and currency manipulation by this or that country. It’s also, to some degree, a byproduct of the central role the United States plays in the global financial system.

There’s even a name for this: the Triffin dilemma. In the mid-20th century, the economist Robert Triffin warned that the provider of the global reserve currency would need to run perpetual trade deficits to keep the world financial system from freezing, with those trade deficits potentially fueling domestic booms and busts.

The key idea is that if a President Trump or any other future leader really wants to reduce our trade deficits in a major way, that leader is going to have to rethink the very underpinnings of global finance.

  NYT

Jesus, the man can't even keep a business running.

There’s no doubt that maintaining the global reserve currency creates costs for the United States, namely a less competitive export industry.

But it also creates a lot of advantages. Lower interest rates and higher stock prices are among them (though they have the downside of also feeding debt-driven booms and busts). Even more important is what the dollar’s prominence in global finance does for America’s place in the world.

[...]

But it’s not just economics. “A lot of the benefits of having the reserve currency are more on the foreign policy side than the economic,” said Jennifer M. Harris, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the recent “War by Other Means,” about the use of economic tools in foreign policy. The centrality of the dollar to global finance gives the United States power on the global stage that no other country can match. It has enforced sanctions on Iran, Russia, North Korea and terrorist groups with the implicit threat of cutting off access to the dollar payments system for any bank in the world that does not cooperate with American foreign policy. Part of what makes the United States powerful is the great importance of the dollar to global finance. And part of the price the United States pays for that status is a stronger currency and higher trade deficits than would be the case otherwise.

We may not have to worry about this aspect of it much longer anyway. The rest of the world, losing confidence in the US daily, may be moving toward other currencies.

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...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.