End of The Offshored Empire (Part 1)

American’s most successful project was one it never admitted running. Now it’s being dismantled by people who didn’t know it existed.

Grüezi!

• In April 1949, Joseph Dodge fixed the yen at 360 to the dollar. That rate held for more than twenty years.

• Dodge, a Detroit banker on temporary assignment to occupied Tokyo, had embedded what became a durable export subsidy into the currency of the country that had been America’s principal Pacific enemy only four years earlier.

• He’d also helped cre…