Wealth & Money Quote by Martin Feldstein

A technocrat’s provocation dressed up as reassurance: Feldstein is arguing that the US can let the dollar fall (or actively prefer a weaker one) without paying the usual political price. The line is engineered to neutralize the two scare stories that always stalk currency talk in Washington: that a cheaper dollar automatically means runaway inflation, and that any policy shift away from “strong dollar” orthodoxy must choke growth. By invoking both “experience” and “economic theory,” he’s signaling bipartisan legitimacy: not just models, not just anecdotes, but the rare overlap where the data and the textbooks agree.

The subtext is a critique of status-quo policymaking. “More competitive dollar” is careful language: it frames devaluation not as national weakness but as a jobs-and-exports strategy, a way to rebalance trade without admitting you’re picking a fight over exchange rates. Feldstein is also implicitly narrowing the inflation risk to context: slack in the economy, anchored expectations, globalized supply chains, and the fact that a moderate currency adjustment doesn’t have to cascade into a wage-price spiral. He’s trying to pry open room for policy flexibility at a time when the US was anxious about trade deficits and manufacturing decline.

There’s a quiet institutional message too. Feldstein, an establishment economist, isn’t calling for radical intervention; he’s giving permission for policymakers to stop fetishizing the strong dollar as a moral stance. The rhetorical trick is the word “could”: it’s advice without fingerprints, an argument meant to be usable by politicians who want the benefits of a weaker dollar while insisting they’re simply following evidence.