| I’m Chris Anstey, an economics editor in Boston, and today we’re putting Fed-week analysis on pause for the moment to look at the debate on the global appeal of US assets. Send us feedback and tips to ecodaily@bloomberg.net. And if you aren’t yet signed up to receive this newsletter, you can do so here. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spurred his audience — or, at least, one financial journalist — to do some web searching on Monday when he trumpeted, “America is the Schelling point of global finance.” Speaking at an annual investor confab, Bessent was invoking the late Nobel laureate in economics, andnoted game theorist, Thomas Schelling. The Schelling point describes an intuitive answer that multiple parties land on without coordinating. Dollar-based assets are the focal point the world turns to, in Bessent’s telling at the Milken Institute. “We have the world’s reserve currency, the deepest and most liquid markets, and the strongest property rights.” Bessent’s colleague Stephen Miran, head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, once argued that “inelastic” — or, inflexible — global demand for dollar assets was problematic. After all, it could lead to a stronger US exchange rate, which incentivizes imports over exports and worsens the American trade deficit. But the Treasury chief said that, in fact, the administration wants to make the US “even more appealing” for international capital. Miran himself seems to have changed his emphasis, saying last week that “in the fullness of time, capital will flow to where the opportunity is, and we’re creating those opportunities.”  Grand Central terminal in October 2024. The late game theorist Thomas Schelling’s studies indicated this location was a natural meeting point for people aiming to connect in New York City. Photographer: George Etheredge/Bloomberg It may not be a coincidence these arguments are being made weeks after the unusual triple-selloff of US Treasuries, the dollar and stocks — which Bessent’s predecessor Janet Yellen suggested amounted to a worrisome “loss of confidence in US economic policy.” Bessent also delivered his message the same day as a remarkable plunge in the greenback against Taiwan’s dollar — the biggest since the 1980s — and to a lesser extent other Asian currencies. Taiwan, the export powerhouse, has a large pool of savings and limited domestic options to put it in. For years, Taiwanese asset managers plowed much of it into American securities. In its latest annual tally, the US Treasury counted almost $800 billion of Taiwanese holdings — practically the size of the island’s GDP. Ever since the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, that region’s savings “have not only been massive, but they’ve had this tendency to be redeployed” into US assets, Louis-Vincent Gave, chief executive officer of Gavekal Research, said in a Monday podcast. “Now, all of a sudden, that trade no longer looks like the one-way slam dunk that it had been for so long.” Schelling’s classic example for his focal-point idea was the scenario of strangers choosing, without communicating beforehand, to meet at noon at the clock at New York’s Grand Central terminal. Currency moves suggest, at least for the moment, not all may be convinced on heading to the financial world’s Grand Central anymore. The Best of Bloomberg Economics | Writers of top economic journal articles have got older and less male over time, according to a new National Bureau of Economic Research paper looking at authorship since the 1960s. The demographics of authors published in leading economics journals — the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy and Quarterly Journal of Economics — show that today women are approaching one-fourth of authors of leading economic research articles. That still lags behind the percentage of women among new Ph.D. economists. Co-authorships have also sharply increased. While 20 years ago there were no papers with more than four authors, last year roughly one in eight articles had five or more authors, Daniel Hamermesh at the University of Texas at Austin wrote in the NBER paper. The data also show that the minimum ages of authors is steadily increasing. | 
