The U.S. dollar sits at the center of a tangle of negative feedback loops that are roiling financial markets and economies around the world. It is coming to the point where the Federal Reserve may have to try to cut through the snarl.

The dollar’s strength over the past year and a half is unprecedented. It has gained 23% against the euro and 17% against the yen—moves that are eclipsed by what it has done versus a host of emerging-market currencies. The dollar has gained 76% on the Brazilian real, 51% on the South African rand and 121% on the Russian ruble.

These moves are making it difficult for U.S. companies to compete globally on price, and are also cooling already low inflation at a time when the Fed wants it to go higher. Further dollar strength risks making the situation even worse, while intensifying global pressures that could put the U.S. economy at risk.

Recognizing this, the Fed and its Chairwoman Janet Yellen may end up not just pushing back rate increases planned for this year, but tabling them for 2016 altogether. Already, futures markets, which at the beginning of the year put even odds on a rate increase at the Fed’s March meeting, show investors now expect the central bank to take a pass.

Among the several, related forces behind the dollar’s rise: The U.S. economy has performed better than many other economies, making it a seemingly safer bet for global investors. The Fed has moved to push rates higher, while its major counterparts are adding to economic stimulus. Oil and other raw-materials prices also have dropped sharply, putting commodity producers at risk and further straining global growth.

But the dollar’s rise is now intensifying many of the strains that have helped propel it higher.

One channel for this is the substantial amount of dollar debt that has been extended to nonbank borrowers outside of the U.S. Many Turkish companies, for example, borrowed heavily in dollars in recent years, even though they had little in the way of dollar revenues.

The 38% rise in the dollar versus the lira over the past 18 months has made those loans hard to service and repay. Such debt strains darken economic outlooks and intensify the need for dollars. But that serves to only send the dollar higher.

Dollar-indebted commodity producers are getting hit by a double punch. The oil, iron ore and soybeans that Brazil exports are quoted globally in dollars. So when a rising dollar causes prices for those to fall, these exporters earn less. Coupled with the deterioration of the Brazilian real, this creates an intense need for dollars that forces commodity producers to sell at even deeper discounts.

Meanwhile, the weakness in other emerging-market currencies is making an already slowing China less competitive globally. That is putting further pressure on Chinese policy makers to further devalue the yuan.

Worry that this might happen is adding to the pressure on commodity prices, since a depreciated yuan would make it harder for Chinese companies to buy raw materials. And it also feeds back into weakness in other currencies as the foreign-exchange market discounts the possibility of a devalued yuan.

Yuan worries are contributing to the massive capital outflows China is experiencing, as Chinese citizens move their money out of the country to protect against future devaluations. Chinese policy makers have been liquidating U.S. Treasurys to hold the yuan steady amid the outflows, but as the decline in Treasury yields this year shows, there have been plenty of ready buyers for this debt.

In effect, the availability of these Treasurys may have drained liquidity from other dollar-denominated debt, making an already bad situation even worse.

For the most part, the problems driving the dollar higher are taking place away from the U.S. But there is no escaping their adverse impact. The combination of overseas weakness and dollar strength has driven import prices lower, pushing the Fed’s goal of reaching its 2% inflation target ever further into the future. It is hitting the economy in other ways, too: If it wasn’t for the expanding trade deficit, the pace of U.S. gross domestic product would have been 0.5 percentage points higher in the fourth quarter.

While the Fed’s mandate remains squarely focused on the U.S., those are hard things for the central bank to ignore, and show how globalization has steadily increased the U.S. economy’s exposure to the rest of the world.

Moreover, with the Bank of Japan last week setting negative rates on some reserves and the European Central Bank signaling it is ready to provide further stimulus next month, the divergence between the Fed’s and other central banks’ policy stances has widened. This threatens to give fresh impetus to the dollar’s rise, and bolsters the case for the Fed to send a strong signal that it is putting its rate-raising plans on hold.

The risk is that won’t be enough to stem the dollar’s rise, and short-circuit the feedback loops. It certainly wouldn’t be a panacea for the world’s problems. But given the alternative of watching a dangerous situation get even more perilous, the Fed may have no choice.