Second Great Depression
Economists had laid out the sequence of causes and effects in a “hard landing,” and it worked just as they said it would. Once the run on the dollar started, everything seemed to happen at once. Two days after the Venezuelan oil shock the dollar was down by 25 percent against the yen and the yuan. Two weeks later it was down by 50 percent. By the time trading “stabilized,” one U.S. dollar bought only 2.5 Chinese yuan—not eight, as it had a year earlier.
Interesting piece from the Atlantic Monthly from the perspective of the 2016 presidential campaign. Kind of old but still pretty pertinent.