In a move that has sent shivers down the collective spine of every pin-striped banker from Canary Wharf to Threadneedle Street, the United States Supreme Court has slammed the brakes on Donald Trump’s latest tantrum: a wholesale purge of the Federal Reserve board. The ruling, delivered with all the gravitas of a hangman reading a recipe for cucumber sandwiches, effectively tells the former President that he cannot simply fire central bankers like recalcitrant waiters who’ve failed to top up his champagne. British economists, those famously optimistic souls who still believe in the magic of fiscal responsibility, are now wringing their hands over the dollar’s future.
Sterling, meanwhile, has responded with the sort of schadenfreude usually reserved for watching a rival slip on a banana peel. The pound briefly surged to a three-week high against the greenback, only to retreat after someone pointed out that our own economic ship is leaking faster than a sieve in a hurricane. The dollar, it seems, has become a currency of pure political theatre.
Every tweet from Mar-a-Lago now sends currency traders into a frenzy typically reserved for discovering the last bottle of gin in a dry county. The Supreme Court’s intervention, while constitutionally sound, has done little to calm the nerves of those who watch the global economy through the bottom of a glass. One imagines the Federal Reserve board members, their positions momentarily secure, breathing a collective sigh of relief before returning to the business of pretending they have any control over this circus.
The ruling itself is a masterpiece of legal obfuscation, citing precedents that were written when America still believed in things like ‘democracy’ and ‘institutions’. But let’s be honest: in an era where the President can convince millions that a stolen election is a more plausible explanation than his own unpopularity, a Supreme Court ruling is about as sturdy as a promise from a politician. British economists, who have long prided themselves on their ability to forecast disaster with clinical precision, are now openly speculating about the dollar’s collapse.
Professor Alistair Finch of the London School of Economics, a man whose tie is always slightly askew as if mocking the very concept of order, put it thus: ‘The dollar is no longer a currency. It is a barometer of American mental health. And the reading is currently ‘catatonic’.
’ The Bank of England, ever the stolid uncle at the family gathering, has issued a statement reassuring markets that all will be well, which is traditionally the signal to start stockpiling tinned goods and gin. The connection between Trump’s Fed purge and the dollar’s stability is not merely tenuous; it is a gossamer thread spun by a spider with a drinking problem. Yet here we are, treating it as gospel.
The dollar wobbles, the pound wobbles, and somewhere in a darkened room a Bloomberg terminal flickers with the last hopes of Western civilisation. The truth is that the global economy has become a hostage to the whims of a man who once suggested injecting bleach to cure a virus. And the Supreme Court, for all its marble columns and powdered wigs, can only do so much to save us from ourselves.
We British may cluck our tongues at American chaos, but we do so while our own ship of state lists dangerously, steered by a government that treats economic policy like a game of darts in a pub after closing time. The dollar will survive, probably. But the faith in the institutions that underpin it?
That is a much more fragile commodity. As I file this report, my gin glass is half empty, which is far too optimistic for the times we live in. The Supreme Court has spoken, and the world has shrugged.
Because in this age of absurdity, the only constant is the punchline.
