“The strong-dollar policy is completely intact with President Trump.”

So said Scott Bessent on Thursday, during an interview with Bloomberg’s Saleha Mohsin. Bessent’s barely a week into his new job running America’s finances and already he’s discovering how difficult life really is as a Trump administration cabinet official.

I don’t know what Scott signed up for (or why), but my guess is he didn’t plan to spend his first few days in office reassuring the public that Elon Musk isn’t exfiltrating data from highly sensitive US government payment systems.

Anyway, Trump’s got a dollar problem on his hands. It’s probably better described as a quandary. A dollar quandary. I discussed it here yesterday, and on countless occasions during Trump’s first term. In a nutshell: Pretty much everything he says and does, with the exception of undermining the rule of law and leading armed coups, is conducive to dollar strength, and yet he needs a weaker dollar to fight the trade war.

There’s even a paradox embedded in that paradox, and Bessent’s touched on it a few times since November. The inflationary impact of tariffs can be partially offset by a stronger dollar, but you can’t have it both ways. Either you want to “win” the trade war with a weaker dollar, or you want to cushion consumers from tariff-related price pressures with a stronger dollar. Trying to have both will drive you crazy or, in Trump’s case, more crazy.

Bessent tried to explain away the tension. “We want the dollar to be strong. What we don’t want is other countries to weaken their currencies, to manipulate their trade,” he told Mohsin, in the same linked interview. (Whatever, Scott. Just don’t let Elon send my social security number to the Kremlin.)

That’s the context for the chart below, from SocGen’s Albert Edwards, which I wanted to very briefly highlight.

As you can see, that’s the rolling 18-month (?) change in the dollar plotted on a four-month lead with non-oil import prices. If you’re wondering why 18 months, I imagine the answer is “because that was the best fit,” which isn’t particularly satisfying, but I’m inclined to cut Albert some slack… on everything.

“Looking at the situation as it stands now, US non-oil import prices are already rising some 2.5% YoY, which is not particularly fast historically,” Edwards wrote, in his latest, adding that some worry the pace will “increase markedly from here and send an inflationary pulse through the US economy at a time when the Fed considers that the previous inflation cycle has not been fully vanquished.”

Albert sees things differently (and not just in this context, I should note). “What is clear though is that the dollar plays a major role in the ups and downs of import prices and the recent dollar surge is set to send import prices sharply lower,” he said.

Now cue Trump to tell Americans how badly the strong dollar is hurting the country and how he’s going to “get it down immediately.”