We have a dummy:

There’s perhaps no better symbolic representation of America’s financial might than the U.S. dollar. And right now, the world’s top currency is taking a big, mighty punch.

The dollar has slumped more than 10% this year, posting its worst decline in the first six months of a year since 1973, back when President Nixon shocked the world by detaching the dollar’s value from gold.

The decline reverses a long stretch of annual gains for the dollar — and it’s especially confounding given that the U.S. economy is still doing well. “America was already great,” says Kaspar Hense, a senior portfolio manager at RBC BlueBay Asset Management.”We are coming from a very strong dollar level where U.S. exceptionalism was what everybody was speaking about in financial markets,” he adds.

Many investors now fear the decline could reflect a new reality for the U.S., just after the country celebrated its 249th birthday. A series of chaotic policies and statements by Trump — from tariffs to attacking the Federal Reserve — has shaken some of the confidence investors around the world had long held in the U.S.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with President Trump, one thing is clear: His second term is shaping up to be quite different — and it’s unnerving many investors, both in the U.S. and abroad. The chaotic rollout of tariffs has led to widespread uncertainty across businesses in the U.S. and around the world.

But President Trump has also disregarded other norms. He’s picked a fight with the Federal Reserve and Chair Jerome Powell over interest rates, for example, upending a tradition upheld by most American presidents not to interfere with the independence of the central bank.

And at a time when there are already serious concerns about the country’s finances President Trump on Independence Day signed a massive bill passed by Congress last week that will rack up trillions of dollars in additional debt.

It’s going really well. Nothing to worry about.

I think this gets to the thing that has people so spooked. It would be one thing if Trump had inherited a huge problem like Obama and Biden did. It often takes years to right the ship after some external shock. But Biden did a terrific job after the pandemic and reassured the world that the U.S. hadn’t completely lost its mind when it weirdly elected that freak in 2016. But then we did it again and this time, instead of riding the wave that his predecessor had put in place and taking credit for it, the freak decided to take a series of idiotic, misguided actions that have probably persuaded the world that we really are fundamentally fucked up. And nobody wants to trust a reserve currency with a madman in charge.