And on one level, it is; a depreciating dollar temporarily helps domestic producers by making imports more expensive.

When combined with tariffs – effectively a sales tax on foreign producers – US industry gets a double boost.

Trump wants the best of both worlds; he wants a weak dollar, but he also very much likes the dollar’s commanding position in the global economy for the geopolitical power it bestows.

Sadly for him, it’s not clear he can have both. To support a weak dollar, he needs to make dollar assets less attractive to foreign investors.

As Stephen Miran, the head of Trump’s council of economic advisers, has suggested, this might be achieved by imposing a withholding tax on income generated by US assets, or by converting foreign holdings of US Treasuries into 100-year bonds.

Trump’s problem is that the less attractive the US makes itself to foreign investors, the less likely it is that the dollar can sustain its dominant reserve currency position.

Use of the dollar for sanctions against countries the US has got a problem with has further undermined trust in the currency as both a store of value and reliable means of exchange.

International trust relies crucially on the idea of a global order based on agreed rules, the very thing Trump wants to dispense with.

So the dollar turns weaker, and together with the Trump tariff shock, it drives up domestic US inflation.

Despite almost daily berating from Trump, Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, is sitting on his hands and refusing to reduce interest rates in the precipitous way the president demands.

The more Trump complains, the more Powell digs in. Determination not to give way has become a matter of principle, almost regardless of its economic merits.

Powell’s stance is totemic in the wider struggle to protect institutional integrity from presidential diktat. Once Federal Reserve independence goes, the whole fragile structure of dollar hegemony begins to crumble. Even Trump must know that.

Meanwhile, Europe is cutting fast – with the notable exception of the UK, where inflation remains a problem.

Normally, America’s higher interest rates relative to Europe would cause the dollar to strengthen, but the trust issue has provoked a very different response – a weaker dollar despite a widening interest rate gap.

Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, sees Trump’s antics as an opportunity for a “global euro moment”. It has long been the ambition of European policymakers to look the mighty dollar in the face, and eventually usurp its position in the international monetary system.

This has always seemed fanciful. For all its grandstanding, the EU remains a disjointed confederation of fiscally sovereign and often deeply divided nations, with no centralised Treasury function to speak of, no banking union and no unified sovereign debt market.

This makes its monetary union acutely vulnerable to existential crisis. Lagarde might think of herself as queen bee, but her powers and reach are remarkably limited.

As long as this remains the case – and there is little sign of it changing – Lagarde’s musings are just delusional nonsense.

Where reserve managers have been diversifying away from the dollar, it has, moreover, tended to be into gold, not the euro. Indeed, gold recently overtook the euro as the biggest central bank reserve asset after the dollar.

A rather more potent long term threat comes from China, whose central bank digital currency and the infrastructure being built around it are deliberately designed to provide an alternative to the dollar for trade and investment.

Those who take umbrage at Trump’s America can try China instead. Who’s to say it’s less reliable than a country that slaps record tariffs on some of its closest allies?

Regrettably, Switzerland is just too small to act as a global reserve currency. As it is, it struggles to manage the inflows of international capital looking for safety amid the bedlam of today’s world.

Already, the Swiss National Bank balance sheet is swollen by its various currency interventions to a size considerably bigger than that of Switzerland’s entire economy. It can surely go no further in printing Swiss francs to buy foreign assets.

But as I say, it’s a nice problem to have.