Dollar drops against basket of currencies after Donald Trump brushed off concerns over slide

Dollar drops against basket of currencies after Donald Trump brushed off concerns over slide

The US dollar has fallen to its lowest level in four years after Donald Trump brushed off concerns over the currency’s fall, sending investors fleeing to traditional havens including gold and the Swiss franc.

The dollar dropped by 1.3% against a basket of currencies after the president’s comments on Tuesday, marking its fourth day of declines, then slipped by a further 0.2% on Wednesday morning.

“No, I think it’s great,” Trump said of the weaker dollar, during a visit to Iowa to promote his record on the economy. Asked whether he was concerned about the currency’s slide, he told reporters: “I think the value of the dollar – look at the business we’re doing. The dollar’s doing great.”

The greenback has tumbled by 10% over the past year, while Tuesday’s fall was the largest one-day drop since last April, when Trump announced his sweeping tariff plans, marking a global market sell-off.

  • Miles O'Brien@startrek.websiteEnglish
    17·
    9 days ago

    It’s a goal if you’re so fucking disgustingly rich you can buy a private island and haven’t seen the poors since your office was close enough to them you could faintly make out a small dot.

    Because you’ll have enough wealth to survive the shit storm, and then there’s nothing those dirty plebians can do to stop you from basically deciding how things run from now on in your little corner.

    I’m making an assumption here that you aren’t disgustingly rich and therefore the thought of “fuck 8 billion other people if I get mine” didn’t come naturally to you.

    • Fedizen@lemmy.world
      11·
      9 days ago

      I mean now is the time to unionize and group up. If people demand wage increases this whole strategy is undermined.

    • Zombie@feddit.uk
      8·
      9 days ago

      Let us glance for a moment at the Middle Ages, when great fortunes began to spring up.

      A feudal baron seizes on a fertile valley. But as long as the fertile valley is empty of folk our baron is not rich. His land brings him in nothing; he might as well possess a property in the moon.

      What does our baron do to enrich himself? He looks out for peasants — for poor peasants!

      If every peasant-farmer had a piece of land, free from rent and taxes, if he had in addition the tools and the stock necessary for farm labour, who would plough the lands of the baron? Everyone would look after his own. But there are thousands of destitute persons ruined by wars, or drought, or pestilence. They have neither horse nor plough. (Iron was costly in the Middle Ages, and a draughthorse still more so.)

      All these destitute creatures are trying to better their condition. One day they see on the road at the confines of our baron’s estate a notice-board indicating by certain signs adapted to their comprehension that the labourer who is willing to settle on this estate will receive the tools and materials to build his cottage and sow his fields, and a portion of land rent free for a certain number of years. The number of years is represented by so many crosses on the sign-board, and the peasant understands the meaning of these crosses.

      So the poor wretches swarm over the baron’s lands, making roads, draining marshes, building villages. In nine years he begins to tax them. Five years later he increases the rent. Then he doubles it. The peasant accepts these new conditions because he cannot find better ones elsewhere; and little by little, with the aid of laws made by the barons, the poverty of the peasant becomes the source of the landlord’s wealth. And it is not only the lord of the manor who preys upon him. A whole host of usurers swoop down upon the villages, multiplying as the wretchedness of the peasants increases. That is how things went in the Middle Ages. And to-day is it not still the same thing? If there were free lands which the peasant could cultivate if he pleased, would he pay £50 to some “shabble of a duke”[2] for condescending to sell him a scrap? Would he burden himself with a lease which absorbed a third of the produce? Would he — on the métayer system — consent to give the half of his harvest to the landowner?

      But he has nothing. So he will accept any conditions, if only he can keep body and soul together, while he tills the soil and enriches the landlord.

      So in the nineteenth century, just as in the Middle Ages, the poverty of the peasant is a source of wealth to the landed proprietor.

      https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread

      Inflation forces poverty upon those with the least wealth. They then become desperate and will be willing to do just about anything they’re told by those with wealth, as long as they can get enough scraps to feed themselves.

      • hector@lemmy.today
        2·
        9 days ago

        Peasants by definition weren’t voluntary labor. They were owned by whomever owned the land, on pain of death. Their kids as well. They started it in the late roman empire when the economy and currency collapsed and everyone was walking off of their jobs as they couldn’t pay for life, couldn’t pay for taxes let alone life. The empire wouldn’t take their own worthless currency as taxes in the latter periods, and they had a seperate currency for the army and their civil service types. Demanding taxes in gold and silver bullion, or services in kind. It’s a long story. But after that all the big landowners, many of which operated big slave farms already, turned their estates into walled castles and became lords. The federal power collapsed with barbarian invasions of horse tribes, and the population welcomed it to get rid of the federal power.

        • Zombie@feddit.uk
          3·
          9 days ago

          That’s entirely dependant upon region and time period. The world is a big place with many forms of peasantry over the years. It’s not a homogenous group with a singular definition. This is a demonstration of a common form to get across a particular point.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kropotkin

          Have a read of the author’s life, he knows what he’s talking about. Not some random schmuck.