Will Trump trigger a global meltdown?

Amid all the talk of tariffs, something far bigger is happening in the United States. Donald Trump’s current trade war is just one part of his team’s radical plan to realign the entire global economy and the dollar’s relationship in it — the biggest shift since Bretton Woods.

It is hard to exaggerate the role of the dollar in the global economy. It is the currency that holds the financial world together “in its inmost folds”, as Goethe put it in Faust. Since the Forties, the US has been the anchor of the global financial and monetary system. It’s a set-up that made sense at the time. It did so all the way up until the collapse of communism. But this millennium, it has become more like a Faustian bargain. It has allowed Europe and Asia to specialise in industrial production and dump their trade surpluses onto the US, and to a lesser extent the UK and Australia. America, meanwhile, has been only too happy to play along, running large trade deficits against the rest of the world. But this came at the cost of de-industrialisation — arguably the very reason Trump was first elected.