McDowell Discusses the Mar-a-Lago Accord and the US Dollar in Deutsche Welle Interview

April 23, 2025

Deutsche Welle

Daniel McDowell

Political Science Department

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs

Economic Policy

Federal

International Affairs

Trade

U.S. Foreign Policy

United States

Deutsche Welle

Daniel McDowell

Amid global turmoil about U.S. economic policy, the value of the U.S. dollar—targeted to strengthen manufacturing in the United States, is at stake. How does the Trump administration plan to change global financial markets via the Mar-a-Lago Accord? Daniel McDowell, Maxwell Advisory Board Professor of International Affairs, discusses in the Deutsche Welle piece, “Inside Trump's radical economics playbook.”

“The second leg of the Mar-a-Lago Accord is essentially this goal to reduce U.S. debt service costs,” McDowell says. The idea would be to force other countries to exchange existing U.S. bonds for 100-year, low- or no-interest bonds. But this raises concerns about undermining the U.S. government's creditworthiness.

“This is such an unprecedented idea. This is, in my opinion, the most kind of fantastical part of this,” says McDowell. “I have a hard time imagining this actually happening...frankly, I have a hard time imagining them even asking for this because I think it'd be kind of nuts,” he says.