Former U.S. president and 2024 White House hopeful Donald Trump has warned the U.S. dollar could lose its position as the world’s reserve currency.
Speaking on the All In podcast, hosted by tech investors Chamath Palihapitiya, David Friedberg, Jason Calacanis and David Sacks, Trump said countries are dropping the U.S. dollar “like flies,” adding that if the U.S. dollar loses its dominant position in global trade, it would be “the equivalent of losing a war.”
Trump’s comments come just after the billionaire Winklevoss twins, who turned to bitcoin and crypto after their war with Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of Facebook, announced they are donating $2 million worth of bitcoin to Trump.
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Former U.S. president Donald Trump has warned the U.S. dollar could lose its position as the world’s … [+]
“[The U.S. is] the big piggy bank but our piggy bank is going to get smaller and smaller all the time because we’re losing power,” Trump said. “We’re losing a lot of countries on the dollar. I mean they’re going like flies. If we ever lose that that’s the equivalent of losing a war that would be unbelievable.”
Trump pointed to Russia, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia as leading the switch away from the U.S. dollar with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) last week warning of a “striking” decline in the U.S. dollar’s share of allocated foreign reserves of central banks and governments.
“I read Saudi Arabia is is willing to now go in various different currencies instead of the dollar,” Trump said. “This is a tragedy this is a big thing that’s happening against our country and we cannot let that happen.”
Trump’s All In podcast appearance follows a crypto charm offensive during a Silicon Valley fundraiser hosted by Sacks and Palihapitiya, it was reported by Reuters. “He said he would be the crypto president,” Trevor Traina, a San Francisco-based tech executive and former Trump ambassador to Austria, was quoted by the newswire.
Trump has surprised some in Washington with his embrace of bitcoin and crypto in recent weeks after making millions from a series of crypto-based digital trading card non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and putting him starkly at odds with the Biden administration’s anti-crypto stance. Trump declared support for crypto in late May and began accepting campaign donations in bitcoin as well as smaller cryptocurrency ethereum and a handful of others.
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Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York wrote a report outlining the narratives around “declining dollar shares in official reserves, and increasing roles for gold holdings by central banks,” which it says has been “inappropriately” generalized beyond “the actions of a small group of countries.”
The report authors found global central banks and finance ministries held nearly $12 trillion of foreign exchange reserves as of the end of 2023, with nearly $7 trillion composed of U.S. dollar assets. World Gold Council data shows “global central banks purchased over 1,100 tons of gold in 2022—more than double the purchase amounts of the previous year—and maintained a similar purchase level in 2023,” according to the report.
“The Fed now admits some countries are moving to gold,” tech investor and former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan posted to X, pointing to what the Fed says is a “small group” that “represents 3 billion people. So 37.5% of the world is moving away from dollars towards gold.”
