Paper Soldiers
How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
"Incisive debut treatise... Mohsin brings to the proceedings a reporter's eye for story" — Publisher's Weekly
From Bloomberg News reporter Saleha Mohsin, the untold story of how one of America’s most invincible institutions—the Treasury—has used the U.S. dollar to define America’s role in the world, and our economic future.
In 1995, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin re-defined the next thirty years of currency policy with the mantra, “A strong dollar is in America’s interest.” That mantra held, ushering in exceptional prosperity and cheap foreign goods, but the strong dollar policy also played a role in the devastating hollowing out of America’s manufacturing sector. Meanwhile, abroad, the United States increasingly turned to the dollar as a weapon of war. In Paper Soldiers, Saleha Mohsin reveals how the Treasury Department has shaped U.S. policy at home and overseas by wielding the American dollar as a weapon—and what that means in a new age of crisis.
For decades, America has preferred its currency superpower-strong, the basis of a "strong dollar" policy that attracted foreign investors and pleased consumers. Drawing on Mohsin's unparalleled access to current and former Treasury officials like Robert Rubin, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen, Paper Soldiers traces that policy's intended and unintended consequences, including the rise of populist sentiment and trade war with China—culminating in an unprecedented attack on the dollar’s pristine status during the Trump presidency—and connects the dollar's weaponization from 9/11 to the deployment of crippling financial sanctions against Russia. Ultimately, Mohsin argues that, untethered from many of the economic assumptions of the last generation, the power and influence of the American dollar is now at stake.
With first-hand reporting and fresh analysis that illustrates the vast, often unappreciated power that the Treasury Department wields at home and abroad, Paper Soldiers tells the inside story of how we really got here—and the future not only of the almighty dollar, but the nation’s teetering role as a democratic superpower.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The U.S. dollar has become a tool for manipulating other countries, according to this incisive debut treatise. Bloomberg News journalist Mohsin traces the origins of the dollar's weaponization to the 1944 meeting between Allied powers establishing that the postwar international financial system would be built on American currency, as well as Clinton-era Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin's policy of maintaining a strong dollar by inspiring investors' confidence. The far-reaching consequences included the rise of sanctions as the preferred method for exerting American policy preferences, as when the U.S. attempted to rein in Iran's nuclear development program in 2012 by barring anyone doing business with the country from using the dollar, a policy that ended up tanking Iran's national currency and "driving millions of Iranians deeper into poverty." Mohsin brings to the proceedings a reporter's eye for story and grounds the fiscal discussions in anecdotes about key Treasury staff, as in her description of the moment Stuart Levey, who oversaw the department's sanctions office from 2004 to 2011, learned how much money his colleagues had uncovered in their efforts to freeze Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi's assets: "Sitting in a high-ceilinged fourth floor office at Treasury with a view of the Washington Monument, Levey's jaw dropped... as he read the final figure for how much money his snoopers had found over the past two days: $30 billion." It's a thorough examination of how America has wielded economic influence to its own advantage across the globe.
