Triffin; the Defunct Economist Who Shapes Trump’s Trade Policy
John Maynard Keynes quipped that otherwise intelligent men usually are slave to some defunct economist. So it is with the Trump administration and a Belgian named Robert Triffin (1911-93).
Something called the “Triffin dilemma,” a theory the Belgian first posited in 1959 when the Bretton Woods gold-exchange system was in place.
This theory seemed prescient after Bretton Woods collapsed in the 1970s. But it takes more than empirical failure to kill an economic theory, so the concept of a Triffin dilemma keeps resurfacing.
Mr. Miran’s November paper, citing the Triffin dilemma, emphasized how these trade and capital flows force the dollar’s value upward, hamstringing U.S. exporters.
The central fact of the global economy is that the U.S. is an engine of productivity growth and attracts investment to match.
These capital inflows, which enrich the U.S., also allow America to run trade deficits that it can finance relatively cheaply.
Joseph C. Sternberg Wall Street Journal Aug. 21, 2025
The Triffin dilemma revisited Smaghi
Underpinning Miran’s argument is a proposition made by the Belgian economist Robert Triffin in the early 1960s.
Triffin argued that the growing demand for dollars as a reserve asset could only be supplied by persistent US current account deficits.
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/04/handelskriget-klas-eklund-forstar.html
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