The US Treasury’s Hammer: The Exchange Stabilization Fund

Think back to when you saw that first Star Wars movie from 1977, and how the Death Star – this massive, cold, metal, ruthless, demonic Imperial battle station the size of a moon – was armed, mobilized & brutal enough to outright zap entire planets to bits from open space with its harnessed, martialized, concentrated, instantaneously deployable laser beam. “That’s no moon”, exclaimed the late great Sir Alec Guinness as the sorcerously prescient, Force-dripping Obi Wan.
Well the modern day equivalent of the Death Star’s punitive, insidious laser beam, in macro-financial and thus geopolitical terms, is the seemingly, innocuously named Exchange Stabilization Fund – or ESF