Wealth & Money Quote by Martin Feldstein

Feldstein’s sentence reads like a bloodless victory lap for a policy mechanic most people never see, and that’s the point: it smuggles a big political claim through technocratic syntax. “The more competitive value of the dollar” is economist code for a weaker dollar, made to sound like a natural upgrade rather than a deliberate shift with winners and losers. “Turned around” implies a clean reversal, as if the trade deficit is a simple dial you can twist, not a messy tangle of consumption habits, industrial capacity, global supply chains, and capital flows.

The intent is to frame exchange rates as a decisive lever of national performance. Feldstein, a major voice in late-20th-century macro debates and a prominent policy insider, is speaking from an era when America’s deficits were treated as both economic symptom and geopolitical embarrassment. The subtext: stop moralizing the deficit, start engineering the price signals. If the dollar gets “more competitive,” exports rise, imports fall, the scoreboard looks better. It’s the language of incentives and adjustment, not sacrifice.

But the phrasing also performs a kind of ideological hygiene. By avoiding “devaluation” or “weakening,” Feldstein dodges the connotations of decline, inflation, and diminished purchasing power. Competitiveness sounds like grit; devaluation sounds like desperation. That rhetorical swap matters because currency policy is politically radioactive: it redistributes quietly. Exporters and manufacturers cheer, consumers pay more at Walmart, creditors worry, and policymakers get to claim prudence instead of choosing sides.

The line works because it’s simultaneously descriptive and exculpatory: the dollar didn’t fall; it became “competitive,” and the deficit didn’t reflect structural choices; it simply got “turned around.”