The US can win the currency war – but it'll regret it

The world's central banks are in a race to reflate their countries' economies by weakening their currencies. And no-one is trying harder than the US Federal Reserve. But even if it wins, the effects will be hugely damaging, says John Stepek.

I'm at the tail end of the generation that still remembers vaguely what it was like to live in a world where the big overshadowing fear behind the daily headlines was nuclear apocalypse, rather than climate change, or total economic collapse.

The optimists' argument against the idea that we'd end up blowing ourselves and each other up was that "no one would be crazy enough to do it". The doctrine of 'mutually assured destruction' the fact that as soon as you launched one missile, the other side would fire off ten in your general direction would prevent anyone from pressing the big red button.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.