Word: dollars
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...dollar hasn't been paying much attention, apparently. It has lost 41% of its value against the euro, its main global competitor, since Bush took office in 2001. And Paulson, when he's not busy battling financial crises here, can usually be found in China beseeching the authorities there to let their currency rise against the dollar...
...should be pretty obvious, then, that the U.S. doesn't have a strong-dollar policy. What's more, it almost certainly shouldn't have one. The huge trade deficits that the country has been running for the past decade seem like a pretty good indication that the dollar was overvalued in global currency markets and needed to come down...
...Bush and Paulson keep saying they're in favor of a strong dollar? Well, the last time a top U.S. official tried to talk halfway honestly about what kind of currency we wanted--then Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in 2001--he spooked markets and was criticized mercilessly...
...strong-dollar mantra was originated by O'Neill predecessor Robert Rubin in the mid-1990s precisely to avoid such confusion. "It was boring, it was dull, it was repetitive, it was nonintellectual, and it worked like a charm," is how Alan Greenspan once described it when he was Fed chairman. "By not varying the statement, an issue never arose about whether a comment involved a subtle change or not in the policy toward the dollar...
...there hasn't really been a significant change in dollar policy post-Rubin. In the 1970s and '80s, the Treasury Department was constantly buying or selling foreign currencies to push the dollar this way or that. Since 1995, when Rubin took office, Treasury has made only a couple of token moves and since 2000 hasn't intervened at all. World currency markets are so huge and active, the thinking goes, that trying to manipulate the dollar is largely futile...