Hours ahead of the reinauguration of Donald Trump as US president last week, Goldman Sachs hosted its annual investment summit in its London office, and one big so-called Trump trade kept on cropping up: the dollar.
The new US president’s economic policy platform remains tough to parse or predict in any kind of detail. But investors, especially speculative hedge funds, have been pretty settled on the idea that Trump means a strong buck — the result of American exceptionalism, stubborn inflation, or both.
For many clients it is, as one of the bank’s most senior traders outlined to the assembled fund managers, “the most obvious trade in the world”, especially in relation to the Chinese renminbi.