When a country is having economic problems–slow growth, outdated industrial base, weak educational system, balance of payments issues–there are generally speaking two ways to fix things:
–internal adjustment, meaning fixing the domestic problems through domestic government and private sector action, and
–external adjustment, meaning depreciating the currency.
The first approach is the fundamentally correct way. But it requires skill and demands a shakeup of the status quo. So it’s politically difficult.
Depreciating the currency, on the other hand, is a quick-fix, sugar-high kind of thing, of basically trying to shift the problem onto a country’s trading partners. The most common result, however, is a temporary growth spurt, a big loss of national wealth, and resurfacing of the old, unresolved problems a few years down the road–often with a bout of unwanted inflation. The main “pluses” of depreciation are that it’s politically easy, requires little skill and most people won’t understand who’s at fault for the ultimate unhappy ending.
Examples:
the Great Depression of the 1930s;
the huge depreciation of the yen under PM Abe, which has impoverished the average Japanese citizen, made Japan a big tourist destination (because it’s so cheap) and pumped a little life into the old zaibatsu industrial conglomerates.
It’s understandable that Donald Trump is a fan. It’s not clear he has even a passing acquaintance with economic theory or history. And in a very real sense depreciation would be a reprise of the disaster he created in Atlantic City, where he freed himself of personal liabilities and paid himself millions but the people who trusted and supported him lost their shirts.
Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, is harder to fathom. She appears to be intelligent, thoughtful and a careful planner. It’s difficult to believe that she doesn’t know what she’s supporting.