Stephen Miran

Stephen Miran is an American economist whose private November 2024 paper "A User's Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System" proposed a menu of tariff and currency measures. He later served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and as a Federal Reserve governor. Similarity between the paper and later policy does not by itself establish adoption or authorship.

Doctrine

Written while Miran was a strategist at Hudson Bay Capital, the User's Guide argues that the dollar's reserve role imposes a persistent overvaluation that hollows out US manufacturing, and canvasses instruments to restructure the system: tariffs as both revenue and negotiating leverage, whose burden he argues can fall substantially on the exporter through currency offset; a coordinated depreciation accord, which the paper styles a "Mar-a-Lago Accord" in deliberate echo of the Plaza Accord of 1985; and measures reaching reserve holdings themselves, including possible charges on foreign official holdings of Treasuries. The paper thereby fuses trade war and currency warfare into a single campaign design against the structure of dollar hegemony's costs. Its economics are contested: mainstream critics dispute the tariff-incidence claims and warn that taxing reserve assets undermines the safe-asset status the strategy simultaneously seeks to exploit.

Career

Miran was confirmed as CEA chair in March 2025. He joined the Federal Reserve Board on 16 September 2025 while on unpaid leave from the CEA. He resigned from the Board effective 21 May 2026, when his successor was sworn in. The extent to which administration policy followed his blueprint is contested, and Miran distinguished the paper's proposals from adopted policy.

Significance

Miran matters as the first theorist inside the modern US government to treat the dollar system's structure, not merely access to it, as a field for coercive restructuring, extending economic-warfare thinking from the sanctions perimeter to the monetary core.

See also

Dollar hegemony and exorbitant privilege · Currency warfare · Tariff as coercive instrument · United States-Japan semiconductor dispute and coordinated currency realignment (1985-1991) · Donald Trump · Robert Lighthizer · Economic warfare · Economic statecraft

Sources

• Stephen Miran, "A User's Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System", Hudson Bay Capital (November 2024).
• Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, "Stephen I. Miran submits his resignation" (14 May 2026).
• Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, "Board Members, 1914-Present", service record for Stephen I. Miran (updated 28 May 2026).