This Economist article tries to explain whether a stronger or weaker dollar is better. The answer is both or possibly neither. A strong dollar makes imported stuff at the store cheaper for consumers, but it lowers the demand for exports and makes it hard for those same consumers to get well-paying jobs making stuff to export. It encourages trade deficits (more imports than exports) for this reason. Because it holds down wages for the working and middle classes, it makes income inequality worse. All other things being equal, the value of the currency should fall relative to foreign currencies in this situation until things are in balance again. This doesn’t happen to the U.S. dollar because it is the world’s reserve currency, meaning other countries are always willing to buy it – people consider it a safe investment even if it is paying very little interest. So this is one thing that is holding our interest rates artificially low. The author concludes that being the only reserve currency is actually not in the country’s long-term interests.

An overvalued currency and persistent trade deficits are fine for America’s consumers, but painful for its producers. The reserve accumulation of the past two decades has gone hand-in-hand with a soaring current-account deficit in America. Imports have grown faster than exports; new jobs in exporting industries have not appeared in numbers great enough to absorb workers displaced by increased foreign competition. Tariffs cannot fix this problem. The current-account gap is a product of underlying financial flows, and taxing imports will simply cause the dollar to rise in an offsetting fashion.

America’s privilege also increases inequality, since lost jobs in factories hurt workers while outsize investment performance benefits richer Americans with big portfolios. Because the rich are less inclined to spend an extra dollar than the typical worker, this shift in resources creates weakness in American demand—and sluggish economic growth—except when consumer debt rises as the rich lend their purchasing power to the rest.

Chalk the headaches generated by low interest rates up to the dollar standard, too. Some economists reckon they reflect global appetite outstripping the supply of the safe assets America is uniquely equipped to provide—dollar-denominated government bonds. As the price of safe bonds rises, rates on those bonds fall close to zero, leaving central banks with ever less room to stimulate their economies when they run into trouble.

One thing I know from painful experience is that when you live abroad, a falling dollar can hurt, because I was getting paid in U.S. dollars and had to pay my rent in Singapore dollars. So my rent was going up every month in U.S. dollar terms, and also going up every year in Singapore dollar terms. Ouch. Well, the life experience gained had a certain value I suppose. That was one of the only times lately that the U.S. dollar has been falling relative to Asian currencies, so I am just unlucky.