Nelson Mullins partner Hendrik Jordaan was quoted in a Crain Currency article discussing family offices’ confidence in the dollar following the UBS Global Family Office Report.

Jordaan, a partner in the firm’s Family Office Transactions Group, noted a tension between belief and action, noting that building the mechanism to act on the conviction is harder than forming the conviction itself. "When your wealth is anchored by an illiquid U.S.-domiciled operating business, a private equity portfolio denominated in dollars and a real estate book that doesn't translate cleanly into a currency hedge, intellectual conviction about reserve currency erosion doesn't automatically produce a reallocation," he said. "The friction is real.”

Jordaan argued that what looks like inertia from the outside "is, for a meaningful number of U.S. families, a deliberate and increasingly sophisticated bet — just not the one the data suggests."

But these allocations are dollar-denominated and U.S.-anchored — dependent on the very fiscal capacity that 65% of family offices globally believed was weakening. Jordaan didn’t see that as a contradiction. Sophisticated families, he said, "are making two distinct, parallel bets: a hedge against dollar erosion at the portfolio construction level, and a directional conviction bet on U.S. industrial and defense capacity at the operating level. The patriotic capital allocation may actually be the most rational expression of a view that the U.S. isn't declining, it's restructuring."

Still, he noted that the dollar question was real. The Swiss franc and euro as the most-cited alternatives was itself revealing, he said: "These aren't families reaching for yield in emerging market currencies. They are looking for ballast.” And he added, when the longest-horizon private capital in the world starts making engineering decisions about currency, the signal is worth taking seriously “even when the moves are slow.”

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