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Over just a few weeks, US President Donald Trump has turned the Western security alliance on its head and unleashed a slew of tariff threats (and tariffs) on China, Canada and Mexico (with many reversals and retreats). At the same time, talk has intensified over a so called “Mar-a-Lago accord” named after Trump’s Florida home and aimed at deliberately weakening the dollar.
On this week’s episode of Trumponomics, host Stephanie Flanders discusses this with guests Shawn Donnan, senior writer for economics with Bloomberg, and Mark Sobel, the US chairman of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum. What ties together Trump’s security and tariff bluster? A paper written in November 2024 by Stephen Miran, where the idea of such a deal first appeared. Miran, a former US Treasury official who went on to work as a strategist in the private sector, is now poised to lead Trump’s White House Council of Economic Advisers.
The currency piece of his paper has been much discussed since its publication, especially by Wall Street in recent weeks. But what hasn’t been discussed as much is the paper’s ideas around a grand reordering of world trade and the financial system. So what is that vision? Does it make any sense intellectually or practically? And how might it change the world if any or all of it were actually attempted?
