Politics & Power Quote by Martin Feldstein

“America needs a competitive dollar” is the kind of technocratic sentence that pretends to be neutral while smuggling in a full political program. Feldstein, a Harvard economist and Reagan-era policy heavyweight, isn’t talking about patriotism in the abstract; he’s talking about price signals, trade balances, and the quiet power of exchange rates to reshape who wins and who loses in the domestic economy.

The key word is “competitive.” It reframes currency value as a tool of national performance, not a badge of financial virtue. In Washington and on Wall Street, a “strong dollar” is often marketed as proof of confidence and discipline. Feldstein flips the prestige hierarchy: an overly expensive dollar can function like a tax on exporters and manufacturers, making American goods pricier abroad and imports artificially cheap at home. “Competitive” is code for “not overvalued,” and, in practice, it often implies tolerance for depreciation, coordinated policy to avoid excessive appreciation, or at least a warning shot at a Federal Reserve stance that tightens too aggressively.

The subtext is distributional. A dollar calibrated for global “competitiveness” quietly prioritizes tradable sectors and employment over the purchasing power benefits consumers get from cheap imports. It also signals anxiety about deindustrialization and persistent trade deficits - an older concern that has since been rebranded in populist language, but traces back to establishment economists like Feldstein who worried the U.S. was pricing itself out of making things.

Even the stagecraft matters: “my theme this evening” evokes a lecture to elites, where policy is narrated as common sense. The elegance of the line is its disguise: it sounds like economics, but it’s an argument about national strategy.