Every year we name a book the “Globalization Book of the Year” (aka the “Globie”). The prize is (alas!) strictly honorific and does not come with a monetary award. But announcing the award gives me a chance to draw attention to a recent book—or books—that are particularly insightful about globalization. Previous winners are listed at the bottom of the column (also see here and here).

This year’s recipient is Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System by Perry Mehrling, Professor of International Political Economy at the Pardee School of Global Studies of Boston University. The book is an intellectual biography of Charles Kindleberger, who came to MIT in 1948 after having served at the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve Board, the Bank of International Settlements and the U.S. Department of State. He was the author of a number of articles and books on international macroeconomics and economic history that have retained their relevance long after their initial publication date. In his work he often focused on the policies needed to achieve international stability in a world of different national currencies and policies. He had a insightful perspective on the circumstances that led to the Great Depression, and what needed to be done to avoid a repeat of that catastrophic occurrence.

Among the topics that Mehrling covers is the evolution of Kindleberger’s views on the global economic role of the dollar. The dollar became the international reserve currency under the Bretton Woods regime, which was designed to avoid a repeat of the relative chaos of the 1930s. Foreign central banks held dollars to stabilize the value of their currencies, while the U.S. stood ready to exchange these dollars for gold. What had been a dollar shortage in the period after World War II became a dollar glut in the 1950s and 1960s, however, and the stability of the link to gold was questioned by Robert Triffin and others.

Kindleberger, on the other hand, believed that the dollar was serving an important international function as a key currency, as the pound had done in the pre-WWI ear. The responsibility of the U.S. was to set monetary policies that took account of the state of the world economy. In 1966, he joined with Walter Salant and Emile Despres in writing an article for The Economist, “The Dollar and World Liquidity: A Minority View,”  which advanced the view that the U.S. served as the “world’s banker,” i.e., as a financial intermediary with respect to Europe that issued short-term deposits and invested long-term capital around the world. The result was an unplanned but functional international monetary system. In that perspective, gold was an unnecessary distraction.

The debate over the architecture of the international monetary system seemed to end when Richard Nixon terminated the exchange of gold for dollars in 1971. The U.S. and the European nations also began the transition away from fixed exchange rate regimes, although the Europeans would move to their own “fixed currency” with the euro. But the dollar did not recede into the mix of the international monies. The end of Bretton Woods also meant the end of the acceptance of capital controls, and capital began to flow more freely, first among the advanced economies and then to the emerging market nations. Private capital flows rose in importance in financing corporate and government debt, and in the cases of external finance these debt instruments (particularly of emerging market economies) were denominated in dollars.

By the 2000s the existence of a “global financial cycle”, based on U.S. monetary policy, became widely accepted. The dollar was indeed the international currency, although this was decided by private markets as much as governmental decrees. Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas of UC-Berkeley and Hélène Rey  of the London Business School, in explaining the central role of the U.S., updated the 1966 title given to the dollar by Kindleberger and his associates to the world’s “venture capitalist.”

One of Kindleberger’s most well known contributions came from his analysis of the Great Depression. Previous work usually placed the blame on the outbreak and/or duration of the crisis to misguided national policies. Kindleberger realized that there was an international dimension: the lack of a country that acted as a leader in providing the international public goods needed for stability. These included maintaining an open market for distress goods, providing long-term lending and overseeing a stable system of exchange rates, ensuring the coordination of macro policies among nations and acting as a lender of last resort. In the 1930s Britain was no longer able to act as the global leader, while the U.S. was not willing to accept that roel. Kindleberger’s insight became the basis of a body of work known as “hegemonic stability,” one of the tenets of international political economy.

Kindleberger offered yet another perspective on financial instability in his Manias, Panics and Crashes. As the title implies, the book is an account of financial crises dating back over time and their common elements. The book was first published in 1978. Robert Aliber took over the job of updating the book after Kindleberger’s death, and the latest edition (the eighth) has Robert N. McCauley as the newest co-author.

 In the book Kindleberger extended Hyman Minsky’s model of financial instability, which was a domestic model, to include an international dimension. Minsky had proposed that credit expansion and contraction followed a cycle of initial displacement, boom, euphoria, profit taking, and panic. In a global context, this cycle can be amplified by short-term international capital flows, that increase the amount of credit that is available during the early stages of the cycle. But the money is rapidly withdrawn by foreign investors when doubts arise about the solvency of the projects they have financed. The withdrawal of foreign capital exacerbates the instability of the last stages of the cycle. Kindleberger’s adaptation of Minsky’s work proved to be remarkably prescient during the emerging market economies’ crises of the 1990s, such as the Asian crisis, as well as the global financial crisis.

Mehrling, therefore, has done a valuable service in explaining Kindleberger’s contributions to our understanding of the global economy. Because his analyses were not based on mathematical models or econometric testing, Kindleberger did not receive the same degree of respect as did his colleagues at MIT and elsewhere who used these tools. But the passing of time demonstrates that Kindleberger possessed a keen understanding of how capital and credit flows functioned, and the need for some form of governmental oversight. Any lack of attention to this work at the time when Kindleberger was active tells us more about the blindfolds of economics than it does about Charles Kindlberger.

“Globies”

2016    Branko Milanovic        Global Inequality

2017    Stephen D. King          Grave New World: The End of Globalization, The Return of History

2018    Adam Tooze                Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

2019    Branko Milanovic        Capitalism, Alone

2020    Tim Lee, Jamie Lee      The Rise of Carry

             and Kevin Coldiron

2021    Anthony Elson             The Global Currency Power of the Dollar

             Jeff Garten                  Three Days at Camp David