Wealth & Money Quote by Martin Feldstein

Feldstein is doing what veteran policy economists often do best: laundering a political impossibility into a technocratic compatibility claim. Everyone loves a “strong dollar” in the domestic imagination because it flatters consumers and signals national vigor; exporters and manufacturers, meanwhile, tend to prefer a cheaper currency that makes U.S. goods easier to sell abroad. Put bluntly, he’s trying to dissolve a fight between Wall Street’s prestige currency and Main Street’s trade anxieties by insisting the two can coexist.

The key move is his elastic use of “strong.” In the global market, “competitive” functions as a polite synonym for “weaker,” but he won’t say that outright because “weak dollar” reads like decline. So “strong at home” becomes a semantic escape hatch: the dollar can be “strong” in terms of domestic purchasing power, financial stability, and anti-inflation credibility, even if it’s allowed to fall against other currencies to relieve trade pressure. It’s a reassurance pitched at two audiences at once: policymakers who fear inflation and voters who fear losing jobs to imports.

The phrase “during the transition” is the tell. Transitions are where currency shifts actually hurt: import prices rise, markets wobble, and the distributional costs land unevenly. Feldstein’s intent is to pre-authorize that turbulence as temporary and manageable, framing adjustment as a planned glide path rather than a loss of control.

Context matters: late-20th-century debates over trade deficits, industrial competitiveness, and dollar valuation made the exchange rate a proxy for national strategy. Feldstein is offering an off-ramp from zero-sum rhetoric, while quietly conceding that “competitiveness” will require someone to pay more for imports for a while.