The strong dollar, warns Larry Fink, CEO of Blackstone in a letter to be released to shareholders next week, "will lead to an erosion of confidence on the part of CEOs, with the potential to slow both investment decisions and future growth in the U.S." When you manage almost $5 trillion in assets, and monitor perhaps twice that much for the U.S. Treasury and other institutions, and are variously described as "possibly the most important man in finance today " and "the first phone call for governments and businesses around the world with questions", attention must be paid to your views on the problems and direction of the economy -- and not only America's. But keep in mind the warning of that great philosopher, the milkman Tevye. In "Fiddler on the Roof" he explains one of the reasons why he wishes he were a rich man: "The most important men in town ... would ask me to advise them, and it wouldn't make one bit of difference it I answer right or wrong. When you're rich they think you really know!"

Fink, however, may really know. He is not alone in worrying that the strong dollar is hurting American exporters and, by extension, overall business confidence. Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen was surprised by the rapidity of the plunge in the euro, which fell 4% in the five days after the European Central Bank started its QE program, and has fallen 25% in the past year. And Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, annoyed with South Korea for artificially depressing its won and our other trading partners for not doing more to stimulate domestic demand, sides with Fink, who is also joined by the nation's farmers and manufacturers such as Caterpillar, heavily dependent on overseas sales of construction equipment. Both the soil tillers and the dirt mover traditionally press for dollar depreciation every time the value of the greenback ticks up, and have new allies since last week when the most recent US jobs report disappointed, in part, some analysts say, because of a drop in exports and the ripple effect that Fink describes. Devaluation is also attractive to politicians and central bankers dissatisfied with the growth rates being recorded by their economies.

Unfortunately, there are at least two potholes on the road to growth via the path of currency devaluation. The first is that our trading partners are not going to sit idly by forever while we gain advantages in world markets by making the dollar cheaper. It was a long time in coming, but euroland and Japan finally decided that the policy of the Federal Reserve Board -- run the presses to stimulate domestic growth and, oh yes, drive down the value of the dollar --  had to be matched. So the central banks of both Japan and the Europe retaliated, and are now driving down the yen and the euro, relative to the dollar, in an attempt to stimulate exports to the U.S. and, thereby, economic growth.

The second reason to pause before devaluing is that keeping the value of a nation's currency below the rate set in a more open market only masks the basic problems of an economy. China, perhaps one of the great currency manipulators of the modern age, kept the yuan at an artificially low level for decades. This stimulated exports while depriving ordinary Chinese consumers -- the affluent managed to afford their designer clothes and scrape together enough foreign currency to buy bolt-holes around the world -- of a sufficiently valuable currency to enable them to import the goods that were simply too expensive in yuan terms. And China is now paying the price for this artificially created, export-led growth. Inefficient companies, buoyed by a cheap currency rather than efficient production techniques, dominate the economy, requiring greater and greater subsidies in order to survive in globalized markets. Companies dependent on governments for their survival eventually find it expedient to, er, "cultivate" government officials, who in turn find it personally profitable to keep their new-found benefactors alive. Corruption is piled on inefficiency, and the mess takes sorting out that often involves less than complete respect for Western-style judicial niceties.

Which brings us back to concerns that the high dollar will slow an already-stumbling recovery to a screeching halt. Mr. Fink is undoubtedly right to worry. And he is probably right that in the near-term a lower dollar would boost exports, other things being equal. So from his vantage point as a man responsible for the value of millions of Americans' investments, he is also right to use his prestige and influence to press for any reasonable policies that he believes would increase the value of those investments. But although private gain and public interest often require the same policies, that is not always the case. And devaluation is no substitute for greater efficiency and productivity. Indeed, it relieves the pressure for such fundamental improvements.

Which is one reason so many policymakers look with disfavor on subsidies, another export stimulant that reduces the pressure on private sector players to increase their efficiency. And why the Export-Import Bank is having difficulty rallying support for its renewal when its current charter expires at the end of June. The bank's principal  beneficiary is Boeing: since 1997, two-thirds of its loan guarantees have gone to foreign airlines that purchase Boeing products. The lower credit costs, alleges Delta Air Lines, are passed on to travelers on such airlines as Air India, which would hardly be shut out of credit markets were Ex-Im guarantees to disappear along with the bank itself come June. This enables foreign carriers to lower ticket prices and take business from Delta, which has spent $10 million lobbying to kill the bank, an effort backed by Washington D.C.'s free-market think tanks and the Koch brothers, and vigorously opposed by Boeing ($70 million on lobbying), the Chamber of Commerce (in other circumstances an advocate for free markets and less government intervention), and congressmen from Boeing's home state of Washington, who argue that Boeing needs offsets to the subsidies received by Airbus and, when it enters the market, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China.       

Unilateral economic disarmament is unpopular and probably unwise. So my guess is that Ex-Im will prevail. But I doubt two other trade-enhancing deal will squeak through. It is unlikely that President Obama will get the negotiating authority he says he needs in order to conclude free trade initiatives with the EU and eleven Pacific Rim countries. Trade union- and green-backed Democrats fear the deals will cost American jobs and dilute existing regulation. Tea Partyish Republicans say the deals require ceding authority of American companies to foreign courts. None of these opponents is terribly concerned about this President's legacy.