While he dismissed Bitcoin as a scam during his first White House stint, Trump has now definitively changed tack. He warmed to cryptocurrencies during his re-election campaign, and to complete his conversion, on 6 March he signed an executive order to set up a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a US Digital Asset Stockpile”.1
The United States government sensibly stockpiles a number of materials in case of an emergency, including oil, military gear, medical supplies and gold. But what is the point of hoarding crypto-currencies which lack any intrinsic utility? Especially if you have constrained yourself, as Trump has done, never to sell the crypto you stashed away? The logic of strong-arming the Federal Reserve into creating a crypto stash is one part self-serving bluster, one part trolling, but also one part strategy.
The self-serving bluster part was made painfully obvious as Donald and Melania Trump pocketed tens of millions of dollars from the otherwise pointless meme coins they issued three days before his inauguration. The trolling part was also on display as he signed the executive order. While ceremoniously putting his exuberant signature on the order’s dotted line, he beamed with the grin of a cheeky peasant who, having just broken into the baron’s pristine drawing room, spoils the splendour of its Persian rugs with his muddied boots. That’s how Democrats and mainstream Republicans felt as they watched Trump elevate the crypto-currencies favoured by libertarians, cranks and criminals to the lofty status previously reserved for solid gold and US Treasury bills.
However, amid this cacophony of creepy profiteering, triumph and despair, it is easy to lose sight of the interesting role that Trump’s strategic crypto reserve plays in his broader economic masterplan. And that would be our mistake.
To recast the global economic order in America’s long-term interest, Trump has a two-pronged, seemingly contradictory, strategy: to devalue the dollar while maintaining its global dominance. By boosting US exports (as the dollar becomes cheaper) while pushing down the US government’s borrowing costs (as foreign wealth piles into US long-term debt), the President seeks to increase US hegemony while also bringing back manufacturing to America. Tariffs, in this context, are the country’s chief weapon, pressurising friends and foes to unload their dollar holdings and buy more long-dated bonds (exceeding 10 years).
But what does crypto have to do with any of this? To get a whiff of the answer, take the case of Japanese banks which hold more than $1 trillion, the result of decades of exports to the United States. Trump wants to bully Tokyo into either investing in the US or dumping most of their dollars into the money markets (thus driving the dollar down) while also not converting them into euros or renminbi (which would risk strengthening the reserve status of rival currencies). What could do the trick? How about convincing, or strong-arming, the Japanese to swap their dollars for crypto? That would work, especially if the Federal Reserve dominated the crypto scene. What else could Trump have meant when asserting in this executive order that the US “has not maximized its strategic position as a unique store of value in the global financial system”?
More intriguingly, four days after the executive order, Trump endorsed stablecoins. In so doing, he added a fascinating new dimension to the idea of forcing non-American institutional investors into moves that serve his economic masterplan.
What are these stablecoins and why are they particularly promising tools for Trump’s twin strategy? Marketed as crypto versions of the dollar, stablecoins such as Tether, USD Coin and Binance are, by design, a contradiction in terms. The whole point of Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, was to stick it to the man — to central bankers and their fiat currencies, the dollar chiefly. But stablecoins, which are mainly used for cross-border payments, are dollar-denominated crypto-currencies that offer you the anonymity, versatility and universality of Bitcoin — while also claiming to guarantee full convertibility to the dollar on a one-for-one exchange rate. Indeed, some of the world’s largest banks and financial institutions are keen to issue stablecoins which are popular in emerging markets. Last month, the CEO of Bank of America suggested it might launch its own, following the examples of PayPal, Revolut, Stripe and many others.
But how can stablecoins promise to keep their value tethered to the dollar, and is this promise credible? In theory, this promise can be met if the stablecoin issuer holds, in some vault, one dollar for every token issued. But, of course, holding zero-interest-bearing dollars in a vault would be anathema to any self-respecting financier. So, even if the stablecoin issuer truly owns an equal amount of dollars to the tokens it has issued, it will immediately trade these dollars for some safe, interest-bearing, dollar-denominated asset — like 10-year US Treasury Bills. This way the issuer is true to their word of backstopping their tokens with real bucks while, at the same time, earning interest. It is an arrangement after Donald Trump’s heart and, I believe, at the centre of the idea of his strategic crypto reserve.
By setting up a crypto reserve containing dollar-backed stablecoins, the US authorities are signalling to foreign dollar holders that the US government endorses their ownership of these cryptocurrencies. During upcoming negotiations with various governments, with tariffs dangling like the sword of Damocles above their head, the President will drop subtle hints about how pleased he will be if foreign investors buy these stablecoins using their own dollars. If they do buy them, the dollar supply will increase, the dollar exchange rate will dip, no other fiat currency will emerge as a potential suitor to the dollar’s reserve currency status, and dollar-denominated stablecoins will rise in value. As these tokens will now be worth more than a dollar, their issuer will have an incentive to issue more tokens to restore the one-to-one exchange rate with the dollar. In the process, they will buy, with proceeds from the additional tokens they issue and sell, more long-dated US Treasuries to backstop their increased token supply. Bingo! Trump’s twin strategy is fulfilled: the dollar is devalued while demand for long-term US government debt rises, thus pushing down US Treasury yields and his government’s debt servicing costs.
Upon hearing this, deafening alarm bells should sound in our heads. For if this strategy works, and stablecoins become a pillar of American hegemony, Trump will have planted a time bomb within the foundations of the global monetary system. Monetary history is littered with the corpses of schemes guaranteeing the convertibility of some new-fangled currency with a time-honoured store of value. The Gold Standard itself was such a scheme, the post-war Bretton Woods system another.
“If stablecoins become a pillar of American hegemony, Trump will have planted a time bomb within the foundations of the global monetary system.”
Take the latter as an example, which coincided with capitalism’s Golden Age — the Fifties and Sixties. The idea behind Bretton Woods was that the West’s currencies would be tethered to the dollar with fixed exchange rates. Moreover, the dollar itself would be anchored to gold at a fixed conversion rate of $35 to an ounce of the magic metal. As long as the US remained a surplus economy, exporting to Europe and Japan goods and services of great dollar value than that of its imports, the system worked fine. America’s surplus dollars were sent to Europe and Japan (in the form of loans, aid or direct investments) and then were recycled back to the US with every Boeing jet or Westinghouse refrigerator that European and Japanese customers purchased.
Alas, by the late Sixties, this recycling system broke down irreparably. The US had turned into a deficit economy, flooding Europe and Japan (later China too) with more and more dollars to finance US net imports. Provided that non-Americans were happy to hoard their dollars, there was no problem. But, the more dollars they had, the more sceptical they were that the US government would honour its promise to hand over an ounce of gold to anyone with $35. Indeed, when several “runs” of America’s gold took place, President Nixon tore up the Bretton Woods agreement, ended the dollar’s convertibility to US government gold, and messaged the Europeans in Trumpian style: “the dollar is our currency but it is your problem.”
So, here is the point: if the mighty US Empire, at the height of its world hegemony, could not honour the anchor of the feted postwar financial system, that is the fixed conversion rate, what gives us the confidence to imagine that a private outfit, such as Tether or Binance, can do it sustainably? Nothing! Indeed, logic dictates the opposite because of the structure of the incentives built into Trump’s strategic crypto reserve. Think about it: as more dollars go into stablecoins, US Treasury yields are lowered and the issuers of stablecoins have a stronger incentive to invest in less stable assets. Indeed, they may even risk issuing additional tokens without backing them with additional dollar-denominated safe assets. The more this goes on, the greater the reliance of the US government, and of the global monetary system, on privateers whose incentives are to act less responsibly. Does this classic case of moral hazard remind you of anything? If not, I would recommend watching The Big Short again.