During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to label China a “currency manipulator” on day one of entering the White House. Trump won the election, but it took his administration another three years before hitting Beijing with the foreign exchange manipulator tag, a broadly symbolic move that had little lasting impact on the value of the Chinese currency.
Turn the clock forward to 2024, Trump is back in the presidential race and threatening to assume the currency manipulator tag himself. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek this month, he called the strong dollar “a big currency problem” and “a tremendous burden on our companies. The discrepancy … between the dollar and the [Japanese] yen and the dollar and the [Chinese] yuan is unbelievable. I
