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The 2021 Globie: “Three Days at Camp David” and “The Global Currency Power of the US Dollar”

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Fall is the time of the year to announce the recipient of this year’s “Globie”, i.e., the Globalization Book of the Year. The prize is strictly honorific and does not come with a check. But 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.

This year there are two winners, Jeff Garten for Three Days at Camp David and Anthony Elson for The Global Currency Power of the US Dollar. Each book deals with the financial hegemony of the U.S. dollar in the global financial system. Together they provide a fascinating account of how the dollar came to hold—and hold onto—this role.

Garten looks at the decision by President Richard Nixon in the summer of 1971 to end the link between the dollar and gold, a central foundation of the Bretton Woods system. Foreign central pegged their exchange rates to the dollar, which was convertible to gold by the U.S. government for $35 an ounce. This arrangement reflected the U.S. position at the end of World War II as the predominant economic power, able to use its influence at Bretton Woods to ensure a dollar-dominated system.

But the imbalance between the U.S. and the rest of the world shifted during the 1950s, particularly as Germany and Japan emerged as economic powers with growing trade surpluses. U.S. government spending resulted in growing foreign holdings of dollars. Yale Professor Robert Triffin pointed out that the ability of the U.S. to exchange its gold for dollars was deteriorating, and this incipient crisis became known as the “Triffin dilemma.” By 1971 this situation was no longer sustainable. Foreign central banks held about $40 billion in dollars while U.S. gold holdings had fallen to $10 billion. Speculators were taking positions on the response of the U.S. and other central banks in a global chicken game.

Garten describes the main players in the decision to end the link with the dollar. Nixon had appointed John Connolly as Treasury Secretary mainly because of Connolly’s political skills.  Connolly in turn depended on the expertise in international finance of Paul Volcker, then under secretary of the Treasury for international monetary affairs. George Schulz was known for his organizational expertise and served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Arthur Burns, Chair of the Federal Reserve, sought to serve Nixon while maintaining some semblance of institutional autonomy. Other participants in the decision included Paul McCracken of the Council of Economic Advisors and Peter Peterson of the White House Council on International Economic Policy.

These men (yes, all men) had different perspectives on the best way to handle the crisis. Volcker and Burns shared an appreciation of the existing framework, and wanted to consult with their counterparts in other countries on reforming the system. Schulz, influenced by his background at the University of Chicago, looked forward to a day when flexible exchange rates would replace pegged rates. Connolly, on the other hand, had no ideological agenda. He sought to promote American interests and Nixon’s re-election, and saw the two as entirely compatible.

Nixon, Garten makes clear, was concerned about the impact of the situation on his 1972 election campaign, and his response must be understood in that context. Nixon consulted with these advisors at Camp David on the weekend of August 13 – 15 on how best to meet the dollar crisis. After a broad discussion, the decision to end the link of the dollar with gold sales was made. The rest of the weekend was spent on deciding on how to present the issue to the American public and U.S. allies.

Nixon spoke that Sunday night, making the case on the need to achieve economic prosperity in the aftermath of the Vietnam war. Other measures he presented included a tax credit for investment, a freeze on wages and prices and the establishment of a Cost of Living Council to enact measures to control inflation, and a 10% temporary tariff on imports. He justified the latter on the “unfair edge” that competitors had gained while the U.S. promoted their post-World War II recovery.

The U.S. subsequently negotiated with the other leading advanced economies on establishing new fixed rates, but the effort was unsuccessful. By March 1973, almost all of the Western European economies and Japan had embraced flexible exchange rates. The Jamaica Accords of 1978 marked the official of the Bretton Woods exchange rate system. Central banks could continue to peg their currencies against the dollar, but there was no obligation on the U.S. to support the “non-system.”

Anthony Elson brings the story forward in time to explain the continuing dominant position of the dollar. It is doubtful that anyone in 1971 or 1978 would have predicted a key role for the dollar in the post-Bretton Woods era, and Elson shows that the dollar’s continued dominance reflects several factors. First, the dollar continues to be used for invoicing international trade, even for non-U.S. trade flows. The dollar is used for this purpose in order to minimize transaction costs, as well as its record of macro stability. Second, the continued dominance of financial markets in the U.S. draws foreign investors looking for safe and liquid markets. This in turn has encouraged the growth of dollar-based financing outside the U.S. Third, the dollar continues to the most commonly-used currency for the foreign exchange reserves of central banks. U.S. Treasury bonds are seen as a global “safe asset.”

All this, Elson points out, bring benefits for U.S. traders and investors, who can use the dollar to purchase foreign goods and assets. In addition, the government can finance a continuing current account deficit through its provision of U.S. Treasury bonds. The foreign demand  for these securities also lowers the cost of financing the fiscal deficits. On the political side, the government has learned how to use access to the dollar-based international clearing system as a tool of foreign policy, effectively “weaponzing the dollar.”

Can this system continue? The “new Triffin dilemma” has arisen as a result of the relative decline of the U.S. economy in terms of its share of world GDP at the same time as the demand for safe assets continues to grow. An increase in the issuance of U.S. securities to finance fiscal deficits coupled to the political posturing over the debt ceiling may threaten the confidence of foreign investors in the ability of the U.S. government to meet its obligations, much as the declining gold stock led to the 1971 crisis.

But what alternatives are there? The Eurozone and China have grown in size and importance and their currencies may serve as regional rivals for the dollar. But a multipolar reserve currency system may itself be unstable. The IMF’s Special Drawing Rights were designed to supplement the dollar, but their use has been limited, and it would take concerted intergovernmental action to encourage its use. Digital currencies may change how we view money, and central banks are actively investigating their use.

There is little history to provide a guide on the circumstances that lead to a change in the hegemonic currency. The dollar began to rival the British pound in usage in the 1920s as the U.S. economy rapidly grew. But the transition was finalized by the costs to Great Britain of fighting World War II. If a peaceful transition to a new reserve currency system is to take place, it will require more international cooperation than has been shown on other issues.

 

2020    Tim Lee, Jamie Lee and Kevin Coldiron, The Rise of Carry: the Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Suppression and the New Financial Order of Decaying Growth and Recurring Crisis

2019    Branko Milanovic, Capitalism Alone: the Future of the System That Rules the World

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

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

2016    Branko Milanovic,  Global Inequality

2015   Benjamin J. Cohen,  Currency Power: Understanding Monetary Rivalry

Monetary Policy in an Open Economy

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The recent research related to the trilemma (see here) confirms that policymakers who are willing to sacrifice control of the exchange rate or capital flows can implement monetary policy. For most central banks, this means using a short-term interest rate, such as the Federal Funds rate in the case of the Federal Reserve in the U.S. or the Bank of England’s Bank Rate. But the record raises doubts about whether this is sufficient to achieve the policymakers’ ultimate economic goals.

The short-term interest rate does not directly affect investment and other expenditures. But it can lead to a rise in long-term rates, which will have an effect on spending by firms and households. The relationship of short-term and long-term rates appears in the yield curve. This usually has a positive slope to reflect expectations of future short-term real rates, future inflation and a term premium. Changes in short-term rates can lead to movements in long-term rates, but in recent years the long-term rates have not always responded as central bankers have wished. Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan referred to the decline in U.S. long-term rates in 2005 as a “conundrum.” This problem is exacerbated in other countries’ financial markets, where long-term interest rates are affected by U.S. rates (see, for example, here and here) and global factors.

Central banks that sought to increase spending during the global financial crisis by lowering interest rates faced a new obstacle: the zero lower bound on interest rates. Policymakers who could not lower their nominal policy rates any further have sought to increase inflation in order to bring down real rates. To accomplish this, they devised a new policy tool, quantitative easing. Under these programs, central bankers purchased large amounts of bonds with longer maturities than they use for open market transactions and from a variety of issuers in order to bring down long-term rates. The U.S. engaged in such purchases between 2008 and 2014, while the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan are still engaged in similar transactions. As a consequence of these purchases, the balance sheets of central banks swelled enormously.

In an open economy, there is another channel of transmission to the economy for monetary policy: the exchange rate. If a central bank can engineer a currency depreciation, an expansion in net exports could supplement or take the place of the desired change in domestic spending. A series of currency depreciations last summer led to concerns that some central banks were moving in that direction.

But there are many reasons why using exchange rate movements are not a solution to less effective domestic monetary policies. First, if a central bank wanted to use the exchange rate as a tool, it would have to fix it. But it then would have to surrender control of domestic money or block capital flows to satisfy the constraint of the trilemma. Second, there is no simple relationship between a central bank’s policy interest rate and the foreign exchange value of its currency. Exchange rates, like any asset price, exhibit a great deal of volatility. Third, the impact on an economy of a currency depreciation does not always work the way we might expect. Former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke has pointed out that the impact of a cheaper currency on relative prices is balanced by the stimulative effect of the easing of monetary policy on domestic income and imports.

Of course, this does not imply that central banks need not take notice of exchange rate movements. There are other channels of transmission besides trade flows. The Asian crisis showed that a depreciation raises the value of debt liabilities denominated in foreign currencies, which can lead to bankruptcies and banking crises. We may see this phenomenon again in emerging markets as those firms that borrowed in dollars when U.S. rates were cheap have difficulty in meeting their obligations as both interest rates and the value of the dollar rise (see here).

Georgios Georgiadis and Arnaud Mehl of the European Central Bank have investigated the impact of financial globalization on monetary policy effectiveness. They find that economies that are more susceptible to global financial cycles show a weaker response of output to monetary policy. But they also find that economies with larger net foreign currency exposures exhibit a stronger response of output to monetary policy shocks. They conclude: “Overall, we find that the net effect of financial globalization since the 1990s has been to amplify monetary policy effectiveness in the typical advanced and emerging markets economy.”

While their results demonstrate the importance of exchange rate in economic fluctuations, that need not mean that monetary policy is “effective” as a policy tool. As explained above, flexible (or loosely managed) exchange rates are unpredictable. They can change in response to capital flows that react to foreign variables as well as domestic factors. The trilemma may hold in the narrow sense that central banks maintain control of their own policy rates if exchange rates are flexible. But what the policymakers can achieve with this power is circumscribed in an open economy.

Dilemmas, Trilemmas and Difficult Choices

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In 2013 Hélène Rey of the London Business School presented a paper at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual policy symposium. Her address dealt with the policy choices available to a central bank in an open economy, which she claimed are more limited than most economists believe. The subsequent debate reveals the shifting landscape of national policymaking when global capital markets become more synchronized.

The classic monetary trilemma (or “impossible trinity”) is based on the work of Robert Mundell and Marcus Fleming. The model demonstrates that in an open economy, central bankers can have two and only two of the following: a fixed foreign exchange rate, an independent monetary policy, and unregulated capital flows. A central bank that tries to achieve all three will be frustrated by the capital flows that respond to interest rate differentials, which in turn trigger a response in the foreign exchange markets.  Different countries make different choices. The U.S. allows capital to cross its borders and uses the Federal Funds Rate as its monetary policy target, but refrains from intervening in the currency markets. Hong Kong, on the other hand, permits capital flows while pegging the value of its currency (the Hong Kong dollar) to the U.S. dollar, but forgoes implementing its own monetary policy. Finally, China until recently maintained control of both its exchange rate and monetary conditions by regulating capital flows.

Rey showed that capital flows, domestic credit and asset prices respond to changes in the VIX, a measure of U.S. stock market volatility. The VIX, in turn, is driven in part by U.S. monetary policies. Consequently, she argued, there is a global financial cycle that domestic policymakers can not resist. A central bank has one, and only one, fundamental choice to make (the “dilemma”): does it regulate the capital account to control the amount and composition of capital flows? If it does, then it has latitude to exercise an independent monetary policy; otherwise, it does not possess monetary autonomy.

Is Rey’s conclusion correct? Michael Klein of the Fletcher School at Tufts and Jay Shambaugh of George Washington University have provided a thorough analysis of the trilemma (working paper here; see also here). Their paper focuses on whether the use of partial capital controls is sufficient to provide monetary policy autonomy with a pegged exchange rate. They find that temporary, narrowly-targeted controls–“gates”– are not sufficient to allow a central bank to both fix its exchange rate and conduct an independent policy. A central bank that wants to control the exchange rate and monetary conditions must impose wide and continuous capital controls–“walls.” But they also find that a central bank that forgoes fixed exchange rates can conduct its own policy while allowing capital flows to cross its borders, a confirmation of the trilemma tradeoff.

Helen Popper of Santa Clara University, Alex Mandilaras of the University of Surrey and Graham Bird of the University of Surrey, Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University (working paper here; see also here) provide a new empirical measure of the trilemma that allows them to distinguish among the choices that governments make over time. Their results confirm, for example, that Hong Kong has surrendered monetary sovereignty in exchange for its exchange rate peg and open capital markets. Canada’s flexible rate, on the other hand, allows it to retain a large degree of monetary sovereignty despite the presence of an unregulated capital market with the U.S.

The choices of the canonical trilemma, therefore, seem to hold. What, then, of Rey’s challenge? Her evidence points to another phenomenon: the globalization of financial markets. This congruence has been documented in many studies and reports (see, for example, here). The IMF’s Financial Stability Report last October noted that asset prices have become more correlated since the global financial crisis. Jhuvesh Sobrun and Philip Turner of the Bank for International Settlements found that financial conditions in the emerging markets have become more dependent on the “world” long-term interest rate, which has been driven by monetary policies in the advanced economies.

Can flexible exchange rate provide any protection against these comovements? Joshua Aizenman of the University of Southern California, Menzie D. Chinn of the University of Wisconsin and Hiro Ito of Portland State University (see also here) looked at the impact of “center economies,” i.e., the U.S., Japan, the Eurozone and China, on financial variables in emerging and developing market economies. They find that for most financial variables linkages with the center economies have been dominant over the last two decades. However, they also found that the degree of sensitivity to changes emanating from the center economies are affected by the nature of the exchange rate regime. Countries with more exchange rate stability are more sensitive to changes in the center economies’ monetary policies. Consequently, a country could lower its vulnerability by relaxing exchange rate stability.

Rey’s dismissal of the trilemma, therefore, may be overstated. Flexible exchange rates allow central banks to retain control of policy interest rates, and provide some buffer to domestic financial markets. But her wider point about the linkages of asset prices driven by capital flows and their impact on domestic credit is surely correct. The relevant trilemma may not be the international monetary one but the financial trilemma proposed by Dirk Schoenmaker of VU University Amsterdam. In this model, financial policy makers must choose two of the following aspects of a financial system: national policies, financial stability and international banking. National policies over international bankers will not be compatible with financial stability when capital can flow in and out of countries.

But abandonment of national regulations by itself is not sufficient: International banking is only compatible with stability if international financial governance is enacted. Is the administration of regulatory authority on an international basis feasible? The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision seeks to coordinate the efforts of national supervisory authorities and propose common regulations. Its Basel III standards set net capital and liquidity requirements, but whether these are sufficient to deter risky behavior is unclear. Those who deal in cross-border financial flows are quite adept in running rings around rules and regulations.

The international monetary trilemma, therefore, still offers policymakers scope for implementing monetary policies. The financial trilemma, however, shows that the challenges of global financial integration are daunting. Macro prudential policies with flexible exchange rates provide some protection, but can not insulate an economy from the global cycle. In 1776, Benjamin Franklin urged the members of the Second Continental Congress to join together to sign the Declaration of Independence by pointing out: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Perhaps that is the dilemma that national policymakers face today.

Morality Tales and Capital Flows

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When the Federal Reserve finally raises its interest rate target, it will be one of the most widely anticipated policy moves since the Fed responded to the global financial crisis. The impact on emerging markets, which have already begun to see reversals of the inflows of capital they received when yields in the U.S. were depressed, has been discussed and analyzed in depth.  But the morality tale of errant policymakers being punished for their transgressions may place too much responsibility for downturns on the emerging markets and not enough on the volatile capital flows that can overwhelm their financial markets.

Capital outflows—particularly those large outflows known as “sudden stops”—are often attributed to weak economic “fundamentals,” such as rising fiscal deficits and public debt, and anemic growth rates. Concerns about such flows resulted in the “taper tantrums” of 2013 when then-Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke stated that the Fed would reduce its purchases of assets through its Quantitative Easing program once the domestic employment situation improved. The “fragile five” of Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Turkey suffered large declines in currency values and domestic asset prices. Their current account deficits and low growth rates were blamed for their vulnerability to capital outflows. There have been subsequent updates of conditions in these countries, with India now seen as in stronger shape because of a declining current account deficit and lower inflation rate, whereas Brazil’s situation has deteriorated for the opposite reasons.

But this assignment of blame is too simplistic. Barry Eichengreen of UC-Berkeley and Poonam Gupta of the World Bank investigated conditions in the emerging markets after Bernanke’s announcement. The countries with largest current account deficits also recorded the largest combination of currency depreciations, reserve losses, and stock market declines. But Eichengreen and Gupta found little evidence that countries with stronger policy fundamentals escaped foreign sector instability. On the other hand, the size of their financial markets as measured by capital inflows in the period before 2013 did contribute to the adverse response to Bernanke’s statement. The co-authors interpreted this result as showing that foreign investors withdrew funds from the financial markets where they could most easily sell assets.

These results are consistent with work done by Manuel R. Agosin of the University of Chile and Franklin Huaita of Peru’s Ministry of Economics and Finance. They reported that the best predictor of a “sudden stop” was a previous capital inflow, or “surge.” Sudden stops are more likely to occur when the capital inflow had consisted largely of portfolio investments and cross-border lending.  Moreover, they claimed, capital surges worsen the current account deficits that precede sudden stops (see also here).

Stijn Claessens of the IMF and Swait Ghosh of the World Bank also looked at the impact of capital flows on emerging markets. They found that capital flows to these countries are usually large relative to their domestic financial systems. Capital inflows contribute to the pro-cyclicality of their business cycles by providing funding for increased bank lending, which are dominant in the financial systems of emerging markets. The foreign money also puts pressures on exchange rates and asset prices, and can lead to higher debt ratios. All these lead to buildups in macroeconomic and financial vulnerabilities, which are manifested when there is negative shock, either in the form of a domestic cyclical downturn or a global shock.

What can the emerging market counties do to protect themselves from the effects of volatile capital inflows? Claessens and Ghosh recommend a combination of macroeconomic measures, such as monetary and fiscal tightening; macro prudential policies that include limits on bank credit; and capital flow management measures, i.e., capital controls. However, they point out that the best combination of these policy tools has yet to be ascertained.

Hélène Rey of the London Business School has written about the global financial cycle, which can lead to excessive credit growth that is not aligned with a country’s economic conditions, and subsequent financial booms and busts. The lesson she draws is that in today’s world Mundell’s “trilemma” has become a “dilemma”: “independent monetary policies are possible if and only if the capital account is managed, directly or indirectly, regardless of the exchange-rate regime.” Joshua Aizenman of the University of Southern California, Menzie Chinn of the La Folette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Hiro Ito of Portland State University, however, report evidence that exchange rate regimes do matter in the international transmission of monetary policies.

Whether or not flexible exchange rates can provide some protection from foreign shocks, the capital controls that have been implemented in recent years will receive a “stress test” once the Federal Reserve does raise its interest rate target. Policymakers will be forced to make difficult decisions regarding exchange rates and monetary policies. Moreover, this tale of financial volatility may have a different moral than the usual one: bad things can happen even to those who follow the rules.

To fix or not to fix: Jeffry Frieden’s “Currency Politics”

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The decision by the Swiss National Bank to abandon its peg to the euro serves as an example of the relatively limited life spans of fixed exchange rate regimes. While the fragility of exchange rate commitments has been known since the publication of a 1995 paper by Obstfeld and Rogoff, the question of why some central banks fix the value of their currencies and others do not is less well understood. Jeffry Frieden’s Currency Politics provides a thoughtful guide to the political economy of exchange rate policy.

Frieden, the Stanfield Professor of International Peace at Harvard’s Department of Government, analyzes the decisions on the choice of exchange rate regime and also the level of the exchange rate. There is rarely a consensus within a country on these issues, and the position of the domestic parties depends on how they are affected by fluctuations in the exchange rate. The principal supporters of a fixed rate will be those who are exposed to substantial foreign exchange rate risk in their global activities, such as financial institutions and multinational corporations. Those who have borrowed in a foreign currency will also have a stake in keeping the domestic value of their debt fixed. Producers of tradable goods tied largely to world prices, such as commodities and standardized manufactured goods, will favor a depreciated exchange rate, as will those who use nontradable goods as inputs. While decisions over the choice of regime and the level of a currency’s value are conceptually separate, Frieden writes that the politics usually lead to a split between those who favor a fixed rate versus those who seek a depreciation.

Frieden tests these hypotheses with data from a range of historical experiences: the U.S. from the Civil War through the end of the 20th century, Europe during the period from the end of the Bretton Woods regime to the introduction of the euro, and Latin America from 1970 to 2010. He uses both qualitative and quantitative analysis in these sections of the book, and his use of data from the earlier periods is particularly skillful. The results show that a consideration of exchange rate-related issues sheds light on the divisions that exist over policies, and can lead to revised views of accepted versions of history.

In the case of the U.S., for example, Frieden breaks the post-Civil War era into the 1862-79 period, when the U.S. returned to the gold standard, and the period of 1880-96, when the gold standard came under attack from the Populist movement. In the first era, those business and financial interests who were most exposed to currency volatility sought to resume the linkage to gold that had been broken in order to finance the Civil War. They were opposed by tradable good producers, including many (but not all) manufacturers, farmers and miners. After 1873, the political divisions centered on whether the U.S. would go on a bimetallic standard of gold and silver, or base the dollar solely on gold. Frieden uses Congressional voting patterns to test whether economic divisions were reflected in Congressional voting on measures related to currency policy. The results generally confirm the influence of the interests he suggests were governing factors. For example, Congressional districts from New England and Pennsylvania, which included manufacturers who competed with foreign producers, were more likely to oppose measures that would return the U.S. to the gold standard. Similarly, representatives of farm products that were exported also opposed a return to gold, while other farming districts tended to support it.

The return of the U.S. to the gold standard in 1879 did not end the dispute. Falling agricultural prices prompted farmers to agitate for a bimetallic regime that would lead to a devaluation of the dollar. Miners concentrated in the Rocky Mountains also supported the use of silver. Manufacturers, on the other hand, abandoned the anti-gold movement as they were protected by high tariffs.  Frieden’s empirical analysis of votes on monetary measures between 1892-95 shows that debt, which has often been viewed as the source of farmers’ concerns, did not sway representatives to vote against gold; indeed, the districts with the largest debt levels were pro-gold. But representatives of export-oriented farm districts were more likely to vote against the gold standard. The People’s Party (the “Populists”) united the farmers, miners and other groups in supporting a bimetallic standard, and in 1896 joined the Democratic Party in supporting William Jennings Bryant for President. Bryant’s loss, followed by a second loss in 1900, signaled the end of organized opposition to the gold standard.

Frieden undertakes similar analyses of depreciation and variation in European exchange rates between 1973-94 and reports evidence supporting the argument that producers exposed to currency risk favored stability, while tradable producers preferred flexibility. Similarly, an analysis of the determinants of Latin American choices of exchange rate regime between 1960 and 2010 finds that the more open economies favor fixed exchange rates. However, manufacturers in the more open economies preferred flexibility.

Frieden convincingly demonstrates, therefore, that exchange rate policy is governed by distributional concerns. Different interests take opposing sides over whether a fixed or flexible regime will be chosen, and whether it will be used as a policy tool to favor domestic producers. The relative influence of the competing interest groups can change over time.  An increase in trade or financial openness, for example, can lead to a new alignment of parties.

Can these considerations be applied to the Swiss case? The dropping of the currency peg discomforted both those who favored a fixed rate and those who will be adversely affected by the subsequent appreciation. But the Swiss central bank must be concerned about the impact of the European Central Bank’s policy of quantitative easing, which would require further intervention and the accumulation of more foreign exchange. The Swiss move may be more of a tactical maneuver during a volatile period than a strategic change in policy. However, those Swiss firms who will see their profits from foreign sales plummet will not be quiescent about the new regime.

China’s Trilemma Maneuvers

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China’s exchange rate, which had been appreciating against the dollar since 2005, has fallen in value since February. U.S. officials, worried about the impact of the weaker renminbi upon U.S.-China trade flows, have expressed their concern. But the new exchange rate policy most likely reflects an attempt by the Chinese authorities to curb the inflows of short-run capital that have contributed to the expansion of credit in that country rather than a return to export-led growth. Their response illustrates the difficulty of relaxing the constraints of Mudell’s “trilemma”.

Robert Mundell showed that a country can have two—but only two—of three features of international finance: use of the money supply as an autonomous policy tool, control of the exchange rate, and unregulated international capital flows. Greg Mankiw has written about the different responses of U.S., European and Chinese officials to the challenge of the trilemma. Traditionally, the Chinese sought to control the exchange rate and money supply, and therefore restricted capital flows.

In recent years, however, the Chinese authorities have pulled back on controlling the exchange rate and capital flows, allowing each to respond more to market forces. The increase in the value of renminbi followed a period when it had been pegged to increase net exports. As the renminbi appreciated, foreign currency traders and others sought to profit from the rise, which increased short-run capital inflows and led to an increase in foreign bank claims on China. But this inflow contributed to the domestic credit bubble that has fueled increases in housing prices. Private debt scaled by GDP has risen to levels that were followed by crises in other countries, such as Japan in the 1980s and South Korea in the 1990s. All of this gave the policymakers a motive for trying to discourage further capital inflows by making it clear the renminbi’s movement need not be one way.

Moreover, the authorities may have wanted to hold down further appreciation of the renminbi. The release of new GDP estimates for China based on revised purchasing power parity data showed that country’s economy to be larger than previously thought. The new GDP data, in turn, has led to revisions by Marvin Kessler and Arvind Subramanian of the renminbi exchange rate that would be consistent with the Balassa-Samuelson model that correlates exchange rates to levels of income.  Their results indicate that the exchange rate is now “fairly valued.” With the current account surplus in 2013 down to 2% of GDP, Chinese officials may believe that there is little room for further appreciation.

Gavyn Davies points out that there is another way to relieve the pressure on the exchange rate due to capital inflows: allow more outflows. Even if domestic savers receive the higher rates of return that government officials are signaling will come, Chinese investors would undoubtedly want to take advantage of the opportunity to diversity their asset holdings. As pointed out previously, however, capital outflows could pose a threat to the Chinese financial system as well as international financial stability. Chinese economists such as Yu Yongding have warned of the consequences of too rapid a liberalization of the capital account.

The Chinese authorities, therefore, face difficult policy choices due to the constraints of the trilemma. Relaxing the constraints on capital flows could cause the exchange rate to overshoot while further adding to the domestic credit boom that the central bank seeks to restrain. But clamping down on capital flows would slow down the increase in the use of the renminbi for international trade. As long as the policymakers seek to maneuver around the restraints of the trilemma, they will be reacting to the responses in foreign exchange and capital markets to their own previous initiatives.

High Road, Low Road

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Among the many thorny issues that would arise if Scotland were be become an independent nation is the question of its choice of a currency. The first minister of Scotland claims that an independent Scotland would continue to use the pound. But Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, has raised several caveats and stipulations—including limitations on fiscal autonomy—that would be required if a currency union were to be formed. Moreover, British elected officials have thrown cold water on the idea. And that could be a problem for an independent Scotland, as there is no obvious good alternative.

Scotland could unilaterally decide to continue using the pound, just as Panama and Ecuador use the U.S. dollar. But dependence on the United Kingdom for its money is not fully compatible with political independence. Nor is it congruent with the international status that the new country would undoubtedly seek.

How about adopting the euro? Scotland would join the current 18 members of the Eurozone, and would have to hope that it did not suffer from any Scotland-specific shocks. Optimal currency theory spells out the alternative mechanisms a country needs to address an asymmetric shock: mobile labor, flexible prices and wages, and/or a fiscal authority that can direct funds to the area facing the shock. The sight of Irish, Spanish, etc., workers leaving their respective homelands in search of work outside of Europe has hardly been reassuring to prospective members. The Baltic states have shown that prices and wages will fall in response to a policy of austerity, but the economic cost is severe. And no Scottish government would survive the harsh policy conditions attached to the financial assistance extended to Greece, Ireland and Portugal by their European partners and the IMF. Joining the Eurozone at this stage of its existence would not be consistent with Scottish canniness.

If Scotland can not—or will not—join an existing monetary union on terms it deems acceptable, should its create its own currency? The prospect of a Scottish currency has drawn a fair amount of comment: see, for example, here and here and here.  A study by Angus Armstrong and Monique Ebell of the National Institute of Economics and Social Research makes the point that the viability of an independent currency for the country would depend on the amount of sovereign debt the new government would have to take on after a breakup witht the United Kingdom versus its anticipated oil revenues. Standard & Poor’s issued a nuanced assessment of how it would rate Scotland’s debt that noted the country’s economic wealth, which is largely based on oil and gas. But the report also raised concerns about the viability of Scotland’s financial sector in the absence of a reputable lender of last resort.

If an independent Scotland issued its own currency, it would be joining other north European countries that either do not belong to the European Union (Iceland, Norway) or have not adopted the euro (Denmark, Sweden). These countries have certainly suffered bouts of volatility and instability (particularly Iceland), but have not fared any worse than many members of the Eurozone. Their decision not to enter the Eurozone itself is interesting and worth further analysis.

But none of them is as deeply tied to another single country as Scotland is to the United Kingdom. Disentangling those ties for the purpose of establishing national autonomy would be difficult and most likely costly. Proclaiming monetary independence, therefore, would be a policy action that makes limited sense in economic terms but carries a great deal of nationalistic baggage. And those types of ventures do not usually end well.

Assigned Readings: November 14, 2013

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Taking a historical perspective of economic changes, this paper argues that muddling through crises-induced reforms characterizes well the evolutionary process of forming currency unions. The economic distortions facing the euro include structural challenges in the labor and product markets, and financial distortions. While both structural and financial distortions are costly and prevalent, they differ in fundamental ways. Financial distortions are moving at the speed of the Internet, and their welfare costs are determined more by the access to credit lines and leverage, than by the GDP of each country. In contrast, the structural distortions are moving at a slow pace relative to the financial distortions, and their effects are determined by inter-generational dynamics. These considerations suggest that the priority should be given to dealing with the financial distortions. A more perfect Eurozone is not assured without successfully muddling through painful periodic crises.

International financial linkages, particularly through global bank flows, generate important questions about the consequences for economic and financial stability, including the ability of countries to conduct autonomous monetary policy. I address the monetary autonomy issue in the context of the international policy trilemma: countries seek three typically desirable but jointly unattainable objectives: stable exchange rates, free international capital mobility, and monetary policy autonomy oriented toward and effective at achieving domestic goals. I argue that global banking entails some features that are distinct from broad issues of capital market openness captured in existing studies. In principal, if global banks with affiliates established in foreign markets can reduce frictions in international capital flows then the macroeconomic policy trilemma could bind tighter and interest rates will exhibit more co-movement across countries. However, if the information content and stickiness of the claims and services provided are enhanced relative to a benchmark alternative, then global banks can weaken the trilemma rather than enhance it. The result is a prediction of heterogeneous effects on monetary autonomy, tied to the business models of the global banks and whether countries are investment or funding locations for those banks. Empirical tests of the trilemma support this view that global bank effects are heterogeneous, and also that the primary drivers of monetary autonomy are exchange rate regimes.

We analyse global and euro area imbalances by focusing on China and Germany as large surplus and creditor countries. In the 2000s, domestic reforms in both countries expanded the effective labour force, restrained wages, shifted income towards profits and increased corporate saving. As a result, both economies’ current account surpluses widened before the global financial crisis, and that of Germany has proven more persistent as domestic investment has remained subdued.

In contrast to earlier recessions, the monetary regimes of many small economies have not changed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. This is due in part to the fact that many small economies continue to use hard exchange rate fixes, a reasonably durable regime. However, most of the new stability is due to countries that float with an inflation target. Though a few have left to join the Eurozone, no country has yet abandoned an inflation targeting regime under duress. Inflation targeting now represents a serious alternative to a hard exchange rate fix for small economies seeking monetary stability. Are there important differences between the economic outcomes of the two stable regimes? I examine a panel of annual data from more than 170 countries from 2007 through 2012 and find that the macroeconomic and financial consequences of regime‐choice are surprisingly small. Consistent with the literature, business cycles, capital flows, and other phenomena for hard fixers have been similar to those for inflation targeters during the Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath.

  • Much has been done since 2010 to reduce macroeconomic imbalances in the Euro Area periphery and to bolster economic and financial integration at the EU level
  • Stronger exports may now be stabilizing output after two years of contraction, but headwinds remain with fiscal adjustment continuing and bank lending constrained
  • Market sentiment, underpinned by OMT, has improved with better economic news
  • Challenges remain, however, including the need to restore full bond market access for Portugal as well as Ireland and agree further financing and relief for Greece
  • Italy remains at risk over the longer term, with a return to durable growth requiring deeper structural reforms that political divisions are likely to impede
  • Progress mutualizing sovereign and bank liabilities looks likely to remain limited, leaving Euro Area members vulnerable to renewed weakness in market sentiment