S9 Ep52: The Dollar Anchor Is Slipping

April 2025: Liberation Day. President Trump announces sweeping new tariffs. And then, the dollar did something a safe haven currency is not supposed to do: it fell.

Tarek Hassan (Boston University, CEPR), working with Thomas Mertens, Jingye Wang and Tony Zhang, has been investigating what makes a currency the global anchor. Being the world's biggest economy helps, but what really matters is how far an economy's shocks affect world prices. Tariffs reduce this effect. But are we near a tipping point, when the euro takes over as the global reserve currency? We might be closer than you think and, if a change happens, it might happen more quickly than you think too.

This is the third of four episodes drawn from papers commissioned for the second Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues conference, held in Venice on 19 and 20 June 2026 and organised by CEPR, CESifo and Sciences Po.

The research behind this episode:

Hassan, Tarek A., Thomas M. Mertens, Jingye Wang, and Tony Zhang. 2026. "Openness, Integration, and the International Monetary Order." Conference draft, presented at the 2nd Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues Conference, Venice, 19 to 20 June 2026. Forthcoming in Economic Policy.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Tarek A. Hassan. 2026. "The Dollar Anchor Is Slipping." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).

About the guest

Tarek A. Hassan is Professor of Economics at Boston University, a Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His research spans international finance, macro-finance, and the political economy of growth, from measuring firm-level political risk with large language models to, in this paper, the size and openness that decide which currency the world treats as safe.

Research cited in this episode

Liberation Day and the April 2025 tariffs. On 2 April 2025, the White House announced a sweeping set of import tariffs. Hassan and his co-authors treat the market reaction to that announcement, in which the dollar fell even as US interest rates rose and US stocks underperformed, as the anomaly their model is built to explain; a currency behaving that way in a crisis usually counts as risky, not safe. CEPR has gathered further commentary on the announcement and its aftermath on its Trump and Tariffs page.

Exorbitant privilege. A term coined in the 1960s for the advantage the United States gets from issuing the world's reserve currency, since foreign investors will hold dollar assets at a lower return than they would demand elsewhere. Hassan uses it to explain why Americans can borrow more cheaply than almost anyone else, and why losing anchor status would raise the US government's own borrowing costs.

Effective size. The paper's central idea. It is not simply how big an economy is, but how much weight its shocks carry in setting world prices, which depends on both actual size and openness to trade and capital flows. Tariffs and capital controls both reduce a country's effective size without touching its GDP, which is how they can knock a currency out of contention as a global anchor.

The Budget Lab at Yale's tariff tracker. The paper draws its estimate that the current average tariff on US imports and exports, once retaliation is included, runs at around 12% from The Budget Lab at Yale (2025), Where We Stand: The Fiscal, Economic, and Distributional Effects of All US Tariffs Enacted in 2025 Through April 2, a running assessment of US trade policy maintained by the nonpartisan Budget Lab at Yale.

Ilzetzki, Reinhart, and Rogoff's exchange rate classification. Ilzetzki, Reinhart, and Rogoff. 2019. "Exchange Arrangements Entering the Twenty-First Century: Which Anchor Will Hold?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 134 (2). This dataset classifies the de facto exchange rate regime of 141 economies. Hassan and his co-authors use it to calibrate their model and to show that the share of countries pegging tightly to the dollar falls with country size almost exactly as their theory predicts.

The Chinn-Ito index of capital account openness. Chinn, Menzie D., and Hiro Ito. 2006. "What Matters for Financial Development? Capital Controls, Institutions, and Interactions." Journal of Development Economics 81 (1): 163 to 192. This widely used index scores how open a country's capital account is to cross-border investment. China scores close to the bottom, in the same range as India, Russia, Brazil and Pakistan, while the United States and the eurozone score close to the maximum, which is central to why Hassan treats the renminbi as a non-contender for anchor status while capital controls remain in place.

More VoxTalks Economics episodes

Tariffs, Uncertainty, and the Exchange Rate, the first episode in this series, in which Alfonso Merendino and Tommaso Monacelli offer another explanation of why the dollar fell rather than rose after the 2025 tariffs.

How Exchange Rates Responded to Tariffs, in which Giancarlo Corsetti also tells Tim Phillips what happened to the dollar after Liberation Day, and why the textbook response did not show up.

Related reading on VoxEU.org

Tariffs and US Dollar Depreciations: Not So Surprising After All, a VoxEU column in which Giancarlo Corsetti, Simon Lloyd and Daniel Ostry argue that the dollar's fall after Liberation Day looks less puzzling once expected retaliation and long run risk are taken into account.

Tariffs, Global Imbalances, and the Dollar, in which Oleg Itskhoki and Dmitry Mukhin examine whether tariffs aimed at shrinking the US trade deficit can actually work, and what trying would mean for the dollar.