Odd Lots - Here’s Who Really Benefits From The Dominance Of The U.S. Dollar

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

When people talk about the dominance of the U.S. dollar in global commerce, they often refer to it as a unique privilege of the United States that its currency is the world’s safe haven. But it’s not so clear who really benefits from the unique role played by the greenback. For one thing, there are wide swathes of U.S. workers whose industries are hurt by its strength. On this episode, we speak with Yakov Feygin, the Assistant Director of the Future of Capitalism project at the Berggruen Institute about the global winners and losers of the dollar system.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Outlots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthall. And I'm Tracy Allaway. So Tracy, I have to say that throughout this whole crisis, there has been sort of one genre of article or one genre of discussion that I've never really been comfortable with. And that is people making really big picture forecasts or statements about sort of the future of the world, I guess. Yeah, I get what you mean. It feels like a little bit early to be jumping to discussing the second order effects, right? Like there's so much to talk about right now as these things are actually unfolding. Yeah, exactly.

And of course, one of the big questions that's out there and that everyone wants to have a view on, and I'm guilty of it too, and I've written about it and I've talked about it, is what happens with sort of globalization, what happens with the future of the dollar and the U.S. is a preeminent role in the global financial system. We sort of talked about it a little bit with Adam Tews. We talked about it with other people as well. And it's, of course, incredibly intriguing to discuss, but we still, we just don't know anything. Yeah, I think that's true. And it definitely falls into one of those sort of big picture things that people are talking about at the moment. And it's something that we've sort of discussed on very,

episodes before, right? Dollar dominance has definitely been a theme for the past year or so on our show. Exactly. You sound a little skeptical. Like when I was like, oh, I don't think we should have, you know, these big picture future conversations, you seem a little skeptical of mine. No, I get it. I mean, I don't think anyone really knows at the moment, so a lot of it is speculation. But also, markets are always forward-looking, so I kind of get why people are naturally tempted to be looking at those big-picture topics. True. Yeah. Yeah. I guess you have to do that. So anyway, we're not going to make a big, we're not trying to make a big forecast here today,

but as we talk about globalization, as we talk about the dollar, I do think it is useful to at least kind of understand how I got to the current system, what the current setup is, and what's actually, yeah, basically understand the current world order and how we got here. Yeah, I think that's a great idea. the dollar is so much a part of the global financial system that we sort of take it for granted, but it's definitely worthwhile to step back for a second and think, like, well, how did we get into a position where emerging markets are all rushing to issue billions of dollars worth of dollar denominated debt? How did we get to a position where all of trade finance is basically denominated

in dollars? Why has that happened? Right. Exactly right. And, you know, there's a lot of misconceptions about all of this, how trade works, who benefits from the strong dollar, or who benefits from the dollar's preeminent role. We often hear of the U.S.'s ability to issue dollars as, quote, a privilege. But it's not really that clear. We talked about this a little bit recently on an episode with Matt Klein, but the sort of the preference of different actors within the global economy regarding the current arrangement is not as clean as long. one might not. It was one might. Right. And there is an argument that pops up every once in a while that having the dollar so enmeshed in the financial system can actually be a negative for the U.S.

And we've seen that prop up, I guess, most recently with, you know, people talk about the Fed being the world central banker. Does that sort of constrain what it can do at times like this and even before then? So, yeah, definitely worth talking about. Okay. So today we are going to talk about that. have a recent guest we actually talked about talked with him several weeks ago about um municipal debt but he is the co-author of a recent essay titled the class politics of the dollar system for the website phenomenal world he is a yakov fagan he's the associate director of the future of capitalism program at the bergrine institute and we're going to talk about how we got to this uh the state how the dollar got to the state and who really benefits from it, who gets hurt from it,

and what it really means to preserve it. So, uh, Yaakov, thank you very much, uh, for joining us. I should note, uh, your co-author, uh, Dominic couldn't make it, unfortunately today, but I'm glad we have you. Why don't you start by telling us what you, uh, the big picture of what your goal was with this essay, the class politics of the dollar system and sort of what that means to. Yeah, well, this essay was kind of a, uh, the big picture of the big picture of what you, uh, the big picture of the, a really long time coming. And I really, the person, the two people, the three people I should probably thank the most for kind of making this as they happen are Dominic, who kind of got us to write it and the Jane Family

Institute, obviously, for publishing it. But there's also someone else in the background of this essay who is Nils Gilman, who is my boss of the Bergruen Institute. And over the year, I've worked with him. We've had this, you know, very long conversation about, you know, why does the world to use the dollar and why is it a problem? And he, you know, he's not a specialist in international finance and this stuff is really technical. And I've spent like quite a long time kind of in a conversation with him like kind of pouring this stuff out, right? Eventually he told me,

you need to write this essay up, right? You need to write an essay that just gives a literature review essentially of this kind of point of view of what the dollar system is politically and why it's not necessarily, you know, a very clear-cut America versus the world story. And so eventually this got written up, right? And that's the kind of story we're trying to tell is it's very hard to pin down a national interest in a world that's hybrid, as Perry Merlin would say, right? It's a world in which there is a private system that's really intermediating on an international level and a national in the system in which nations are essentially creating public goods called units of account, right? And that this international system mediates this, the hierarchy of these units of account,

just as much as national power dynamics do. So walk us through that thesis, then. You talk about the political system around the dollar. What is that exactly? So our argument is that it's actually class, right, as almost a, or at least like social stratification as a kind of meta politics, right? That the dollar is actually pretty good for a large cross-section of people, no matter what they're position in the global value chain or where they're located.

And it's pretty bad for other cross-sections, again, without considering international boundaries that they are, it's pretty bad for a lot of people, no matter where they're located or what part of the global value chain there. So this is similar. Again, I mentioned in the intro. We recently talked to Matt Klein, whose new book also sort of explores some of these tensions, that it doesn't really, it's not really so much about, say, US versus China or the dollar versus another currency, but that there are people all different positions around the world in any country who benefit from the existing system, and there are people all around the world who lose out from the existing system. So let's start by talking about, in your view, who benefits the most?

What kind of actors in the global economy benefit the most from the dollar dominance, the role of the dollar? Well, you know, the way we put it is it's kind of elites, especially rent-taking elites within the United States. And it's also elites, especially capital-owning elites in other countries, and especially developing countries where they're also rent-taking elites. I think that's a kind of running theme through this

is that the way this system has evolved has really, really encouraged rent-taking. And the people who don't benefit are obviously people who are working people, right, who have to do the work and are either getting worse jobs or not picking up most of the kind of surplus that are producing.

Can you walk us through the mechanics of how this benefits that sort of global elite and hurts a lot of workers? I imagine a lot of it has to do with the sort of long run appreciation in the dollar, but just walk us through exactly how you see that working. Well, sure, right? So our story isn't as much based on appreciation or at least in or at least day-to-day exchange rates. That's a whole other conversation about how that's measured. but more about structures and institutions, right? What the global dollar system does is give a privileged set of access to the international, right?

And what I mean by that is the ability to choose where your wealth is stored and how you store it and what kind of return. And that has long run consequences, right? So you have an argument, for example, Sultan Poznor has made that a lot of, of offshore plumbing is that black hole he refers to is actually because of the accumulation of really wealthy entities, right? Looking for somewhere to go. And that's not a privilege that most people can have access to, right?

I mean, and the other thing is obviously, you know, the exploitation of rents, of corruption. There's a really great book called Dictators Without Borders, right? by Alexander Cooley and John Heather Shaw, which really outlines how the internationalization of the dollar and the creation of international money centers actually enables corruption in Central Asia and enables the suppression of democracy in Central Asia.

Because what these dictators or, like, strongmen are able to do is partly out access to this international system. So if you're within, if you're, say, an elite within the ruling base, you get to take your proceeds offshore. If you're not, you don't get to do that or you get prosecuted suddenly out of nowhere. And that's a dynamic that's only possible with globalization. So we hear during the boom, or during the expansion, there were all the stories about, you know, Russian money or Chinese money or whatever it was flooding into dollar assets or real estate in the United States and California, New York City, London, other sort of

of so-called tier one cities, essentially this internationalized financial system, again, or as you put it, available to some, available to the elites, and theoretically available for elites to dole out access to, but that's clearly not something that's a typical Chinese person or a typical Russian could do with their money. So it creates a large scale. On a large scale, right. So it creates a domestic, domestic bifurcation in all different kinds of places, not just the use. Yes. What about the impact on, I guess, employment and the sort of trade landscape? This is the overlap with Matt Klein's argument from a couple episodes ago. But like, what does the primacy of the dollar actually mean for the U.S. trade deficit?

and the structure of the labor market. Well, I mean, that's actually like straightforward Matt Klein's and Mike Pettus's argument, which this is really like almost a tribute to, right? And it's like the simple accounting identity, right? Capital account surplus, current account deficit. So you're always going to have a situation in which, you know, the U.S. trade deficit is negative as long as there's this giant desire for U.S. dollar-based assets and not only U.S. dollar-based assets, you know, created in the U.S., but offshore that

eventually will have to come at some point onto the continental U.S. So the current account will become a positive, but it's not even a full reflection of the demand for U.S. dollars to some extent, right? And that will create a trade deficit and that will create, we think that probably has something to do with the fact that non-tradable goods, in particular services, right, have appreciated so much more in the United States. And this is a kind of global phenomenon, but it's much more extreme in the United States. They have appreciated much more than tradable goods. And that is incredibly difficult for the average household, right? And, you know, I don't think there's any particular magic to manufacturing jobs, but it has made, it has had,

you know, especially regional consequences for manufacturing industries. Though to me, it's not as important what people do. It's that they're compensated fairly for what they do. And so it's not just manufacturing. It's the entire dynamic of the economy changes. And, you know, I use the term Dutch disease kind of as a joke, but there is a kind of political story to Dutch disease about elites who gain their incomes more and more from rents and then a kind of service economy that lives off of the needs

to the need to service those elites in whatever way they need to be serviced as creating extreme inequality and bifurcation in an economy and I think that's pretty obvious for the U.S. let alone the fact that those same studies say that really lowers the quality of governance. Can you remind people what Dutch disease traditionally is within in usually an EM commodities context. Like you hear it within, say, a country that has a huge oil or copper export, what the traditional use of that term is and sort of explicate a little bit what you mean

by how it applies in the US context. Yeah, well, like the term Dutch disease and the usual EM term is if you have a country that suddenly finds, let's say, a bunch of oil or any other valuable resource and that really makes the economies, exports dominated by that resource that really pushes up the value of their currency and because of that currency value, that increase in currency value, it crowds out all other industries and eventually

that has all kinds of problems for development, but it also creates political problems in which you do have an increasingly small rent-seeking elite or a right that controls that resource that's making most of the income. So and all the other industries are crowded out. So you get an economy that's really focused on one industry with a lot of the capital flowing to one set of people and everyone else working towards, you know, working for those people or not working very well.

There was a second part to that question, right? What it means for the United States? And that's, you know, the joke we had, and it's almost like a joke. It actually came from FT Alphaville. post by Brendan Greeley we both liked as like, like we should kind of think about this further is the United States exports its debt and its currency, which is somewhat of a form of credit. You're painting a sort of maybe negative isn't the right word, but clearly we're focused on the

drawbacks of having a dollar dominant system. Are there any benefits to the U.S. from having the greenback, so enmeshed in the financial system? There are obviously tons of benefits to this, right, for the United States. One is, you know, the political power, what people call infrastructural power around kind of the key nodes of this global financial system that sit in the U.S. We don't think that's necessarily the primary motivation for how this system comes about or why it continues to operate. But there's obvious advantages in terms of what sanctions regimes can do in terms of, and, in terms of what, you know, other political benefits to that or geostrategic ones, there's also, you know, the big economic benefit, right, and consequences that, you know,

you can run a massive deficit and it won't really matter, right? There's this question of, you know, deficit finance or surplus finance, whether that's a universal feature of the, like, deficits not mattering or not, that's an open question. but I think they certainly don't matter that much for the United States. And because of that, like, we kind of argue that the deficit should be seen as a public resource, right? Because that is to be redistributed. So in some ways, the redistribution of our deficit should be thought of as our Norwegian oil fund. Yeah, that's a really interesting point.

I mean, I know I've seen people argue. that the U.S. should have, oh, like our equivalent of a sovereign wealth fund or the Alaskan oil fund or something like that. But this isn't. I'm one of those people. Oh, you are. Like, especially we, I think at Berggruen, we actually kind of do advocate that and especially on a state level. We think it's really appropriate for states, for example, and should be done on both the state and national level. Well, explain further. What is the model? Like, if the deficit is sort of our asset. If it's our equivalent of the Norwegian oil fund, what would also be the benefit from a more explicit state level or national sort of sovereign wealth? Well, I think those are

somewhat different questions. I mean, for the United States, it's obviously not going to be a natural resource is going to be the ownership of financial assets, right? And because of those inflows, those financial assets will be very valuable on some level. And, you know, there's, I think, very good argument for the state owning some of them, especially given the fact that in, like, the big assets in the United States, for example, the tech companies, you know, they were developed largely with taxpayer money and with, like, public investment. So I think the state should re-recouping some of that,

some of that value that is actually quite related to that. But I don't necessarily think that's the same motivation as something like a Norwegian oil fund or a you know the Singapore sovereign wealth funds or any of the sovereign wealth funds you see which are really investing into some kind of resource right in an export driven economy so in Singapore it's really like the manipulation of their own currency right right and right so that's a resource they're investing in by sending the money outside same thing with Norway right Norway is actually you know mostly invest is largely investing outside as well as is inside with the inflows they get it from oil.

So I think the United States should be doing the same in a variety of ways, right? State governments should be considering using them because they are, you know, not, you know, as we talked about before, they aren't financially sovereign in the same way the national government is. But even on a national level, there's been so much investment into valuable companies, right, by the public, by the state. And even, you know, there is a story that some of these assets are actually, you know, not, I wouldn't say overvalue, but the value of those assets are kind of larger because of the,

you know, big capital inflows the U.S. gets. So the state should get a cut of that in that way. But I think in order to control this particular phenomenon, I think borrowing is actually much more, you know, borrowing or printing money or however. you put it, using the deficit as a sovereign wealth fund equivalent is much more effective than a sovereign wealth fund would be for the same purpose precisely because we wouldn't be using a sovereign wealth fund in the United States the exact same way as say Norway or Singapore does. It's not the equivalent. I want to get back to the deficit idea because I guess

in talking about the drawbacks of dollar dominance for the U.S., the subtext here is that, well, maybe there would be benefits if we had a system that was less reliant on the dollar. But how do you stack up those benefits versus having the privilege of being able to not really, you know, pay that much attention to your deficit or at least not worry that much about it in the same way that, say, an emerging market would? You know, that's the thing. I am not sure I think the dollar system has to be bad. I think there are a variety of ways of structuring the dollar system.

And really, when we get to our alternatives at the bottom of the paper, you know, we're not talking about Bankor. We think it's, you know, Bankor is a great idea that King's plan probably would have created a better world, but we're not getting there anytime soon. And we don't think the dollar is going to be necessarily, you know, replaced any time soon. So I think the question is more important.

The more important question is how do we live with this system that has been created by a privatized international space, right? And this is where I put my historian hat on and tell you that, you know, for in global history or at least the study of like global society and global politics, there's a very strong and I think correct argument that empire and international space comes before the nation state. And we don't really have a tool of governing the international space, right? So we might be stuck with this thing. The point is how to fix it. So, I mean, domestically, it does mean using the deficit as an explicit redistributive tool and also an explicit development tool, which is why we're such big fans of, you know, the creation of these like systems of development banks

or a NeoR reconstruction finance corporation, which would be able to leverage some of this stuff right. into productive investment, right? Because we have very low infrastructure capacity right now. So that's an easy thing to do, for example, right? And it would improve equity by creating well-paying jobs, and we probably will have to run a permanent fiscal policy, I think, in order to create that.

That's domestically, I think internationally, there are a variety of ways of fixing it. There's this, you know, there's been some suggestions by, you know, Nathan Tankus and other, popular guest on your show. And also that has been taken up either directly or just in parallel by Gordon Brown in a letter, actually, our institute helped put together, which would be to give the IMF swap lines to give the STRs dollar-like, you know, dollar-like backing. Our big one is that we think this can also be done somewhat, you know, laterally by the United States, by integrating swap

agreements right into trade agreements, right, that would argue that in exchange for maintaining a reasonable trade current account surplus or deficit across this like free trade zone, you would have a guarantee that your currency will be backed by a Fed swap line in the event of a currency crisis. And that's a win-win for everyone, right? And it's actually pretty interesting, right? Because it's, I mean, there can be other conditions attached to that involving good governance. like good macroeconomic macroprudential policy, that's a good way to sequence that because most of the time their currency crisis is you're trying,

like the IMF comes in and it's trying to do all these austerity-based reforms that don't really work, and they actually make things worse. So if you could incentivize some good macroprudential policy at the start of an agreement, right is much more effective than doing it at the worst time possible when you need to rebuild a country's demand, right? So I think that's a really great way of doing it. And I think because the system has evolved to give the U.S. this ridiculous

infrastructural power, it should be an onus of the U.S. government to think this way. So just to roll it all together, I guess the idea is that rather than dismantle dollar dominance, which is something that people have been talking about and to some extent trying to do for decades now, also to Joe's point in the intro, people are talking about it again now, and it's entirely unclear whether or not the current crisis is actually going to lead to that outcome. But rather than try to get rid of dollar dominance, the idea here is to try to use it differently in order to sort of compensate for the downsides of that dollar dominance. So try to redistribute the deficit for your idea and sort of offset or increase economic productivity of the U.S.

Is that right? Yes. Yes, absolutely. And increase the equity of the world as a whole. Right. I think instead of dismantling a system, which is very difficult, and I don't think we necessarily, I think the whole point of the essay, right, is that it's not a political decision. It's a politically economic decision.

It's very hard to dismantle a system, right, that's not been necessarily created with a purpose but has emerged out of, you know, underlying class and economic phenomena. So a better way to do this, right, would be to manage the system. It's hard to get there without an intermediate step of managing the system that exists

rather than tearing it down. So like I said to the intro, I think it's always very dicey to look at what we've experienced just over the last two months. We're recording this on May 21st or maybe the last three months and try to make some broad proclamations

about what the future will look like. So we won't do that. But in your view, the stresses that we've seen on the system so far, do you see 10, building that could materially change, that at least are pressuring the system in such a way that we could get some sort of meaningful change, either if it's sort of the end of this current dollar system or some sort of rearrangement of it so that the benefits of it can be spread

more equitably. Do the stresses and political pressures and the economic pressures that we're seeing all around the world potentially move the ball in one direction or another? in your view. So this is the interesting part is I'm actually not sure from the point of view of the people who can make a difference right now that there is that much stress on the system. Right. The system is operating in many ways the way it should operate given how it's evolved. Right. Who is winning and who is losing from it? Right. And the people who can make a change for the most part are winning from it. Now, I think in the long run, maybe that's not sustainable for them and that in the long run they should be thinking of,

like, can we really go on with such a bifurcating world that is happening, you know, both within and without our borders. And that maybe there would be someone out there with the political will, especially, you know, in the United States to put this at the forefront and really do something about it, right, for the good of the many. But until you have such a change, until you really have a set of governments that are interested in the common good, I'm not sure the system will change. Because for the long term, it's operating exactly as it's designed to operate. It's, well, I wouldn't say design, but it's reflecting. the underlying distributions of surplus, let's say, that have allowed it to operate before. So on that note, if we all agree that it's difficult to change that system because you sort of have

invested or interests who are invested in it, how do you go about actually building grassroots support, I guess, for modifying it? Like, how would you do that? You've written an essay, but what would be the next steps? You know, I kind of wish I knew. If I did know, I'd be doing it much more. I mean, I think this essay and whatever else in writing is at least step one of it, right? Because, you know, you talk to, you know, anyone, you talk to your family members,

you talk to your friends about this. You talk to even colleagues, right, that are senior from you who don't specialize or think about these particular issues. And it's an absolute mystery to people, right? And then when you start talking about it in kind of more approachable terms, I'm not sure if I did that or not, but I tried, you know, then people go, you know, why do we have this system? So it's going to take political organizing at the end and it's going to take a very difficult

kind of political organizing that might not just be national but transnational. And, you know, it would be great if that worked. I'm not sure I'm the right person or anyone is the right person we know is the right person to do that, but I don't, or even if it'll depend, it'll definitely not depend on any single person. It'll depend on a movement, right? But that's the, you know, the only way to do this is to think about this with some intent, you know? Well, just to, I mean, just to, and this was kind of what I was going to get at with my question is like, and we again, talking about this on Matt Klein, with Matt Klein, there is some sort of like theory that the election of Donald Trump was an implicit or it had the

potential to be sort of an implicit rejection of this system. He did well among the ostens, the populations that haven't benefited. You mentioned sort of regional manufacturing, the people who have not thrived in globalization. It was not a political movement that was a rejection of the dollar system, it was just maybe some consequences of trajectories of U.S. economics. And of course, we haven't really seen any meaningful changes. He's done some things on trade with China, but nothing like that substantive in a lot of elite like Donald Trump very much. But could it be that the rejection of the system or the change just comes through

lots of domestic changes such as what we're seeing in the U.S., but all around the world? Yes, on one level, you can argue that Donald Trump, and to an extent, I don't think that's the reason Trump was elected. I think the reason Trump was elected is overdetermined. There were so many factors behind it. But, yeah, obviously, that's one reason was, you know, the rejection of the harms of this system. But the problem is we're talking about trade, right? Like, one thing I always try to get across in these discussions is trade. is only one element of this.

And it's like a balloon, right? If you shut it down in one place, it will come out of another place. I don't know exactly how you politicize it, but you need to politicize it systemically. And, you know, there have been, there has been some attempt. There's the Baldwin-Hawley act that Mike Pettis is behind. And I think it will work to a certain extent, but I think it has, you know, big downsides. It just actually might reintroduce a lot of very risky financial practices, as we've seen during the 08 crisis, right? So I think there are, that's one way of getting at it.

I think we've introduced a more internationalist way to try to get at it. And I think hopefully some people who want to do politics and start thinking in this way and, you know, start to actually, you know, inform and build up systems like this. And maybe that's not for us to do, you know, we're, we, We're writers, we're intellectuals, you know, we're analysts. Our job is to try to speak to those in power and tell them, hey, it's not working, thinking about it in a different way. Well, Yako Fagan, really great having you on. It's a phenomenal essay.

I strongly would encourage people to go check it out. It's at the website, Phenomenalworld.org, the class politics of the dollar system. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. Thanks, Yacob. That was great. Tracy, I love talking with Yaakov. Again, I think this, there is so much talk about the dollar and who it benefits, and so much of it is so, like, simplistic.

And it's, it's extremely complicated, like what the dollar system means and really, who benefits from. Yeah, it's definitely, it's sort of like a middle path in thinking about dollar dominance. But I have to say, for someone who started this episode talking about how they don't like big picture ideas, this seems like a pretty big. picture idea, does it not? No, I don't get me wrong. I leave big picture ideas. I think maybe what I was saying is like, I don't like big picture like prediction. Right.

Maybe that's what I meant. Okay. Well, no, big picture, like, we're all about that here. But I just mean like, oh, the world, we're never going to go back to X or we're never going to trade with China the same again or whatever it is or we're going to onshore all of our manufacturing because we had a shortage of masks. That's the kind of stuff like, it's like, let's just wait a few months. Yeah.

Okay, well, this definitely isn't a prediction. In fact, I mean, Yakov was pretty upfront in talking about how this is all a very conceptual idea and he isn't really sure how to get it done politically. But I think also when we talk about this kind of stuff, then, you know, I sometimes think about this in connection with modern monetary theory as well. But if we say that, you know, the thing that we thought was a problem isn't actually the problem. The problem is politics. I'm not sure that gets us. very far. Like, that's the sticking point and that seems to be the most difficult thing of all. Yeah, I had to have thought too, which is that if you have a set of people who broadly benefit from the existing system and those existing people are the ones who are in position to rewrite laws or change how society operates, you do run into this situation. And it's like, okay, well, like, so who, where does the political catalyst come from? And I thought your question to that, really important and you know there's there's really no obvious answer to that at all and it's again as you say with modern monetary theory it's like okay so we can spend more and do a lot more with

a fiscal policy than maybe a lot of mainstream views would suggest but that doesn't give us any answers into how we actually get people to vote for it right that's exactly it but like someone has to actually vote to spend the money even if in theory fiscal governments or have much more flexibility on fiscal policy than people really. But I do like the idea of sort of using the deficit to redistribute to America, I guess. Like, that's an intriguing thing. And if it sort of offsets some of the negative side effects that we've seen from dollar dominance, you know, the expansion of the trade deficit and the idea that the U.S.'s biggest export

is dollar denominated financial assets versus something more tangible, like, I don't know, widgets or something. That's an intriguing idea, I think. Definitely. And again, like, you have the Alaska State Oil Fund and everyone who's a citizen of Alaska gets a check to benefit from that. And so you could theoretically apply that model to the U.S. as a whole in which the idea is like, okay, well, the U.S. is a major exporter of dollar and dollar assets. So let's use that. Let's use that national asset to distribute money more aggressively domestic. Yeah. Should we leave it there? Let's leave it there.

Okay. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. And you should follow our guest on Twitter, Yaakov Fagan. He's on Twitter at Buddy Yaakov.

And follow his co-author. We couldn't have him today, but he's also great Dominic Loisder. He's at Dominic Loisder. And you should also follow the Jane Family Institute, which published the essay. Everyone should really go check it out. They are at Jane Family Inf. And follow the Bruguin Institute, Yaakov's employer at Bruguin Institute. And follow our producer on Twitter, Laura Carlson.

She's at Laura M. Carlson, the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy, at Francesca Today. As well as all of the Bloomberg podcasts, check them out under the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening. You know,