Archive for the 'currency manipulation' Category

Dr. Shelton Remains Outspoken: She Should Have Known Better

Published July 11, 2019 currency manipulation , gold standard , Great Depression , Judy Shelton , Uncategorized 5 Comments
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I started blogging in July 2011, and in one of my first blogposts I discussed an article in the now defunct Weekly Standard by Dr. Judy Shelton entitled “Gold Standard or Bust.” I wrote then:

I don’t know, and have never met Dr. Shelton, but she has been a frequent op-ed contributor to the Wall Street Journal and various other publications of a like ideological orientation for 20 years or more, invariably advocating a return to the gold standard.  In 1994, she published a book Money Meltdown touting the gold standard as a cure for all our monetary ills.

I was tempted to provide a line-by-line commentary on Dr. Shelton’s Weekly Standard piece, but it would be tedious and churlish to dwell excessively on her deficiencies as a wordsmith or lapses from lucidity.

So I was not very impressed by Dr. Shelton then. I have had occasion to write about her again a few times since, and I cannot report that I have detected any improvement in the lucidity of her thought or the clarity of her exposition.

Aside from, or perhaps owing to, her infatuation with the gold standard, Dr. Shelton seems to have developed a deep aversion to what is commonly, and usually misleadingly, known as currency manipulation. Using her modest entrepreneurial skills as a monetary-policy pundit, Dr. Shelton has tried to use the specter of currency manipulation as a talking point for gold-standard advocacy. So, in 2017 Dr. Shelton wrote an op-ed about currency manipulation for the Wall Street Journal that was so woefully uninformed and unintelligible, that I felt obligated to write a blogpost just for her, a tutorial on the ABCs of currency manipulation, as I called it then. Here’s an excerpt from my tutorial:

[i]t was no surprise to see in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal that monetary-policy entrepreneur Dr. Judy Shelton has written another one of her screeds promoting the gold standard, in which, showing no awareness of the necessary conditions for currency manipulation, she assures us that a) currency manipulation is a real problem and b) that restoring the gold standard would solve it.

Certainly the rules regarding international exchange-rate arrangements are not working. Monetary integrity was the key to making Bretton Woods institutions work when they were created after World War II to prevent future breakdowns in world order due to trade. The international monetary system, devised in 1944, was based on fixed exchange rates linked to a gold-convertible dollar.

No such system exists today. And no real leader can aspire to champion both the logic and the morality of free trade without confronting the practice that undermines both: currency manipulation.

Ahem, pray tell, which rules relating to exchange-rate arrangements does Dr. Shelton believe are not working? She doesn’t cite any. And, what, on earth does “monetary integrity” even mean, and what does that high-minded, but totally amorphous, concept have to do with the rules of exchange-rate arrangements that aren’t working?

Dr. Shelton mentions “monetary integrity” in the context of the Bretton Woods system, a system based — well, sort of — on fixed exchange rates, forgetting – or choosing not — to acknowledge that, under the Bretton Woods system, exchange rates were also unilaterally adjustable by participating countries. Not only were they adjustable, but currency devaluations were implemented on numerous occasions as a strategy for export promotion, the most notorious example being Britain’s 30% devaluation of sterling in 1949, just five years after the Bretton Woods agreement had been signed. Indeed, many other countries, including West Germany, Italy, and Japan, also had chronically undervalued currencies under the Bretton Woods system, as did France after it rejoined the gold standard in 1926 at a devalued rate deliberately chosen to ensure that its export industries would enjoy a competitive advantage.

The key point to keep in mind is that for a country to gain a competitive advantage by lowering its exchange rate, it has to prevent the automatic tendency of international price arbitrage and corresponding flows of money to eliminate competitive advantages arising from movements in exchange rates. If a depreciated exchange rate gives rise to an export surplus, a corresponding inflow of foreign funds to finance the export surplus will eventually either drive the exchange rate back toward its old level, thereby reducing or eliminating the initial depreciation, or, if the lower rate is maintained, the cash inflow will accumulate in reserve holdings of the central bank. Unless the central bank is willing to accept a continuing accumulation of foreign-exchange reserves, the increased domestic demand and monetary expansion associated with the export surplus will lead to a corresponding rise in domestic prices, wages and incomes, thereby reducing or eliminating the competitive advantage created by the depressed exchange rate. Thus, unless the central bank is willing to accumulate foreign-exchange reserves without limit, or can create an increased demand by private banks and the public to hold additional cash, thereby creating a chronic excess demand for money that can be satisfied only by a continuing export surplus, a permanently reduced foreign-exchange rate creates only a transitory competitive advantage.

I don’t say that currency manipulation is not possible. It is not only possible, but we know that currency manipulation has been practiced. But currency manipulation can occur under a fixed-exchange rate regime as well as under flexible exchange-rate regimes, as demonstrated by the conduct of the Bank of France from 1926 to 1935 while it was operating under a gold standard. And the most egregious recent example of currency manipulation was undertaken by the Chinese central bank when it effectively pegged the yuan to the dollar at a fixed rate. Keeping its exchange rate fixed against the dollar was precisely the offense that the currency-manipulation police accused the Chinese of committing.

I leave it to interested readers to go back and finish the rest of my tutorial for Dr. Shelton. And if you read carefully and attentively, you are likely to understand the concept of currency manipulation a lot more clearly than when you started.

Alas, it’s obvious that Dr. Shelton has either not read or not understood the tutorial I wrote for her, because, in her latest pronouncement on the subject she covers substantially the same ground as she did two years ago, with no sign of increased comprehension of the subject on which she expounds with such misplaced self-assurance. Here are some samples of Dr. Shelton’s conceptual confusion and historical ignorance.

History can be especially informative when it comes to evaluating the relationship between optimal economic performance and monetary regimes. In the 1930s, for example, the “beggar thy neighbor” tactic of devaluing currencies against gold to gain a trade export advantage hampered a global economic recovery.

Beggar thy neighbor policies were indeed adopted by the United States, but they were adopted first in the 1922 (the Fordney-McCumber Act) and again in 1930 (Smoot-Hawley Act) when the US was on the gold standard with the value of the dollar pegged at $4.86 $20.67 for an ounce of gold. The Great Depression started in late 1929, but the stock market crash of 1929 may have been in part precipitated by fears that the Smoot-Hawley Act would be passed by Congress and signed into law by President Hoover.

At any rate, exchange rates among most major countries were pegged to either gold or the dollar until September 1931 when Britain suspended the convertibility of the pound into gold. The Great Depression was the result of a rapid deflation caused by gold accumulation by central banks as they rejoined the gold standard that had been almost universally suspended during World War I. Countries that remained on the gold standard during the Great Depression were condemned to suffer deflation as gold became ever more valuable in real terms, so that currency depreciation against gold was the only pathway to recovery. Thus, once convertibility was suspended and the pound allowed to depreciate, the British economy stopped contracting and began a modest recovery with slowly expanding output and employment.

The United States, however, kept the dollar pegged to its $4.86 $20.67 an ounce parity with gold until April 1933, when FDR saved the American economy by suspending convertibility and commencing a policy of deliberate reflation (i.e. inflation to restore the 1926 price level). An unprecedented expansion of output, employment and income accompanied the rise in prices following the suspension of the gold standard. Currency depreciation was the key to recovery from, not the cause of, depression.

Having exposed her ignorance of the causes of the Great Depression, Dr. Shelton then begins a descent into her confusion about the subject of currency manipulation, about which I had tried to tutor her, evidently without success.

The absence of rules aimed at maintaining a level monetary playing field invites currency manipulation that could spark a backlash against the concept of free trade. Countries engaged in competitive depreciation undermine the principles of genuine competition, and those that have sought to participate in good faith in the global marketplace are unfairly penalized by the monetary sleight of hand executed through central banks.

Currency manipulation is possible only under specific conditions. A depreciating currency is not normally a manipulated currency. Currencies fluctuate in relative values for many different reasons, but if prices adjust in rough proportion to the change in exchange rates, the competitive positions of the countries are only temporarily affected by the change in exchange rates. For a country to gain a sustained advantage for its export and import-competing industries by depreciating its exchange rate, it must adopt a monetary policy that consistently provides less cash than the public demands or needs to satisfy its liquidity needs, forcing the public to obtain the desired cash balances through a balance-of-payments surplus and an inflow of foreign-exchange reserves into the country’s central bank or treasury.

U.S. leadership is necessary to address this fundamental violation of free-trade practices and its distortionary impact on free-market outcomes. When the United States’ trading partners engage in currency manipulation, it is not competing — it’s cheating.

That is why it is vital to weigh the implications of U.S. monetary policy on the dollar’s exchange-rate value against other currencies. Trade and financial flows can be substantially altered by speculative market forces responding to the public comments of officials at the helm of the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan or the People’s Bank of China — with calls for “additional stimulus” alerting currency players to impending devaluation policies.

Dr. Shelton here reveals a comprehensive misunderstanding of the difference between a monetary policy that aims to stimulate economic activity in general by raising the price level or increasing the rate of inflation to stimulate expenditure and a policy of monetary restraint that aims to raise the relative price of domestic export and import-competing products relative to the prices of domestic non-tradable goods and services, e.g., new homes and apartments. It is only the latter combination of tight monetary policy and exchange-rate intervention to depreciate a currency in foreign-exchange markets that qualifies as currency manipulation.

And, under that understanding, it is obvious that currency manipulation is possible under a fixed-exchange-rate system, as France did in the 1920s and 1930s, and as most European countries and Japan did in the 1950s and early 1960s under the Bretton Woods system so well loved by Dr. Shelton.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the US dollar was chronically overvalued. The situation was not remediated until the 1960s under the Kennedy administration when consistently loose monetary policy by the Fed made currency manipulation so costly for the Germans and Japanese that they revalued their currencies upward to avoid the inflationary consequences of US monetary expansion.

And then, in a final flourish, Dr. Shelton puts her ignorance of what happened in the Great Depression on public display with the following observation.

When currencies shift downward against the dollar, it makes U.S. exports more expensive for consumers in other nations. It also discounts the cost of imported goods compared with domestic U.S. products. Downshifting currencies against the dollar has the same punishing impact as a tariff. That is why, as in the 1930s during the Great Depression, currency devaluation prompts retaliatory tariffs.

The retaliatory tariffs were imposed in response to the US tariffs that preceded the or were imposed at the outset of the Great Depression in 1930. The devaluations against gold promoted economic recovery, and were accompanied by a general reduction in tariff levels under FDR after the US devalued the dollar against gold and the remaining gold standard currencies. Whereof she knows nothing, thereof Dr. Shelton would do better to remain silent.

Judy Shelton Speaks Up for the Gold Standard

Published April 24, 2019 currency manipulation , Judy Shelton , R. G. Hawtrey , Uncategorized 15 Comments
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I have been working on a third installment in my series on how, with a huge assist from Arthur Burns, things fell apart in the 1970s. In my third installment, I will discuss the sad denouement of Burns’s misunderstandings and mistakes when Paul Volcker administered a brutal dose of tight money that caused the worst downturn and highest unemployment since the Great Depression in the Great Recession of 1981-82. But having seen another one of Judy Shelton’s less than enlightening op-eds arguing for a gold standard in the formerly respectable editorial section of the Wall Street Journal, I am going to pause from my account of Volcker’s monetary policy in the early 1980s to give Dr. Shelton my undivided attention.

The opening paragraph of Dr. Shelton’s op-ed is a less than auspicious start.

Since President Trump announced his intention to nominate Herman Cain and Stephen Moore to serve on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, mainstream commentators have made a point of dismissing anyone sympathetic to a gold standard as crankish or unqualified.

That is a totally false charge. Since Herman Cain and Stephen Moore were nominated, they have been exposed as incompetent and unqualified to serve on the Board of Governors of the world’s most important central bank. It is not support for reestablishing the gold standard that demonstrates their incompetence and lack of qualifications. It is true that most economists, myself included, oppose restoring the gold standard. It is also true that most supporters of the gold standard, like, say — to choose a name more or less at random — Ron Paul, are indeed cranks and unqualified to hold high office, but there is indeed a minority of economists, including some outstanding ones like Larry White, George Selgin, Richard Timberlake and Nobel Laureate Robert Mundell, who do favor restoring the gold standard, at least under certain conditions.

But Cain and Moore are so unqualified and so incompetent, that they are incapable of doing more than mouthing platitudes about how wonderful it would be to have a dollar as good as gold by restoring some unspecified link between the dollar and gold. Because of their manifest ignorance about how a gold standard would work now or how it did work when it was in operation, they were unprepared to defend their support of a gold standard when called upon to do so by inquisitive reporters. So they just lied and denied that they had ever supported returning to the gold standard. Thus, in addition to being ignorant, incompetent and unqualified to serve on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, Cain and Moore exposed their own foolishness and stupidity, because it was easy for reporters to dig up multiple statements by both aspiring central bankers explicitly calling for a gold standard to be restored and muddled utterances bearing at least vague resemblance to support for the gold standard.

So Dr. Shelton, in accusing mainstream commentators of dismissing anyone sympathetic to a gold standard as crankish or unqualified is accusing mainstream commentators of a level of intolerance and closed-mindedness for which she supplies not a shred of evidence.

After making a defamatory accusation with no basis in fact, Dr. Shelton turns her attention to a strawman whom she slays mercilessly.

But it is wholly legitimate, and entirely prudent, to question the infallibility of the Federal Reserve in calibrating the money supply to the needs of the economy. No other government institution had more influence over the creation of money and credit in the lead-up to the devastating 2008 global meltdown.

Where to begin? The Federal Reserve has not been targeting the quantity of money in the economy as a policy instrument since the early 1980s when the Fed misguidedly used the quantity of money as its policy target in its anti-inflation strategy. After acknowledging that mistake the Fed has, ever since, eschewed attempts to conduct monetary policy by targeting any monetary aggregate. It is through the independent choices and decisions of individual agents and of many competing private banking institutions, not the dictate of the Federal Reserve, that the quantity of money in the economy at any given time is determined. Indeed, it is true that the Federal Reserve played a great role in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, but its mistake had nothing to do with the amount of money being created. Rather the problem was that the Fed was setting its policy interest rate at too high a level throughout 2008 because of misplaced inflation fears fueled by a temporary increases in commodity prices that deterred the Fed from providing the monetary stimulus needed to counter a rapidly deepening recession.

But guess who was urging the Fed to raise its interest rate in 2008 exactly when a cut in interest rates was what the economy needed? None other than the Wall Street Journal editorial page. And guess who was the lead editorial writer on the Wall Street Journal in 2008 for economic policy? None other than Stephen Moore himself. Isn’t that special?

I will forbear from discussing Dr. Shelton’s comments on the Fed’s policy of paying interest on reserves, because I actually agree with her criticism of the policy. But I do want to say a word about her discussion of currency manipulation and the supposed role of the gold standard in minimizing such currency manipulation.

The classical gold standard established an international benchmark for currency values, consistent with free-trade principles. Today’s arrangements permit governments to manipulate their currencies to gain an export advantage.

Having previously explained to Dr. Shelton that currency manipulation to gain an export advantage depends not just on the exchange rate, but the monetary policy that is associated with that exchange rate, I have to admit some disappointment that my previous efforts to instruct her don’t seem to have improved her understanding of the ABCs of currency manipulation. But I will try again. Let me just quote from my last attempt to educate her.

The key point to keep in mind is that for a country to gain a competitive advantage by lowering its exchange rate, it has to prevent the automatic tendency of international price arbitrage and corresponding flows of money to eliminate competitive advantages arising from movements in exchange rates. If a depreciated exchange rate gives rise to an export surplus, a corresponding inflow of foreign funds to finance the export surplus will eventually either drive the exchange rate back toward its old level, thereby reducing or eliminating the initial depreciation, or, if the lower rate is maintained, the cash inflow will accumulate in reserve holdings of the central bank. Unless the central bank is willing to accept a continuing accumulation of foreign-exchange reserves, the increased domestic demand and monetary expansion associated with the export surplus will lead to a corresponding rise in domestic prices, wages and incomes, thereby reducing or eliminating the competitive advantage created by the depressed exchange rate. Thus, unless the central bank is willing to accumulate foreign-exchange reserves without limit, or can create an increased demand by private banks and the public to hold additional cash, thereby creating a chronic excess demand for money that can be satisfied only by a continuing export surplus, a permanently reduced foreign-exchange rate creates only a transitory competitive advantage.

I don’t say that currency manipulation is not possible. It is not only possible, but we know that currency manipulation has been practiced. But currency manipulation can occur under a fixed-exchange rate regime as well as under flexible exchange-rate regimes, as demonstrated by the conduct of the Bank of France from 1926 to 1935 while it was operating under a gold standard.

Dr. Shelton believes that restoring a gold standard would usher in a period of economic growth like the one that followed World War II under the Bretton Woods System. Well, Dr. Shelton might want to reconsider how well the Bretton Woods system worked to the advantage of the United States.

The fact is that, as Ralph Hawtrey pointed out in his Incomes and Money, the US dollar was overvalued relative to the currencies of most its European trading parties, which is why unemployment in the US was chronically above 5% after 1954 to 1965. With undervalued currencies, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Britain, France and Japan all had much lower unemployment than the US. It was only in 1961, after John Kennedy became President, when the Federal Reserve systematically loosened monetary policy, forcing Germany and other countries to revalue their countries upward to avoid importing US inflation that the US was able redress the overvaluation of the dollar. But in doing so, the US also gradually rendered the $35/ounce price of gold, at which it maintained a kind of semi-convertibility of the dollar, unsustainable, leading a decade later to the final abandonment of the gold-dollar peg.

Dr. Shelton is obviously dedicated to restoring the gold standard, but she really ought to study up on how the gold standard actually worked in its previous incarnations and semi-incarnations, before she opines any further about how it might work in the future. At present, she doesn’t seem to be knowledgeable about how the gold standard worked in the past, and her confidence that it would work well in the future is entirely misplaced.

Defining Currency Manipulation for Scott Sumner

Published September 6, 2017 currency manipulation , exchange rate protection , Scott Sumner 15 Comments
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A little over a week ago, Scott Sumner wrote a post complaining that I had not yet given him a definition of currency manipulation. That complaint was a little bit surprising to me, because I have been writing about currency manipulation off and on for almost five years already on this blog (here’s my first, my second, and a more recent one). Now, in all modesty, I think some of those posts were pretty good and explained the concept of currency manipulation fairly clearly, so I’m not sure why Scott keeps insisting on the need for a definition. I am more than happy to accommodate him, but before doing so, I want to respond to some comments that he made in his post.

Scott began by quoting at length from my most recent post in which I responded to his criticism of my contention that China has in the past — but probably not the more recent past — engaged in currency manipulation. My basic argument – buttressed by an extended quotation from the world’s greatest living international-trade theorist, Max Corden — was that although nominal exchange rates are determined by monetary-policy choices, such as exchange-rate pegs or targets or nominal quantities of money, while real exchange rates are determined by real forces of resource endowments, technology, and consumer preferences, it is possible for monetary policy — either deliberately or inadvertently — to affect real exchange rates. This did not seem like a controversial argument to make, but Scott isn’t buying it.

Scott examines the following passage from my quotation of Corden:

A nominal devaluation will devalue the real exchange rate if there is some rigidity or sluggishness either in the prices of non-tradables or in nominal wages. The nominal devaluation will then raise the prices of tradables relative to wage costs and to labour-intensive non-tradables. Thus it protects tradables.

And he finds it wanting.

I can’t figure out what that means. Taken literally it seems to imply that a nominal depreciation that is associated with a real depreciation is a form of protectionism. But that’s obviously nonsense. So what is he claiming? We know the nominal exchange rate doesn’t matter; only the real rate matters. But currency manipulation can’t be just a depreciation in the real exchange rate, as real exchange rates move around for all sorts of reasons. If a revolution broke out in Indonesia tomorrow, I don’t doubt that the real value [of] their currency would plummet. But no one would accuse Indonesia of currency manipulation.

There is I think some confusion in the way Scott interprets what Corden said. Corden says that if monetary policy is used to depreciate the real exchange rate, then it may be that the monetary policy had a protectionist intent. Scott’s response is that there are many reasons why a real exchange rate could depreciate, and most of them have nothing to do with any protectionist intent. If there is a revolution in Indonesia, the Indonesian real exchange rate will depreciate. Scott asks whether Indonesian revolutionaries are currency manipulators. My answer is: not unless there is a plausible argument that the revolution was intended to cause the real exchange rate to depreciate, and that the a revolution is a moderately efficient way of benefitting those Indonesians who would gain from a depreciated exchange rate. I think it would be hard to make even a remotely plausible argument that starting a revolution would be a good way for Indonesian industrialists to capture the rents from their revolutionary protectionist strategy. But if Scott wants to make such an argument, I am willing to hear him out.

Scott considers another example.

How about a decline in the real exchange rate caused by government policy? Maybe, but I don’t recall anyone accusing the Norwegians of currency manipulation when they set up a sovereign wealth fund for their oil riches. That’s a government policy that encourages national saving and hence boosts the current account. Nor was Australia accused of currency manipulation when they did tax reform in the late 1990s.

OK, fair enough. There are government policies that can affect the real exchange rate. Is every government policy that reduces the real exchange rate protectionist? No. The reduction of the real exchange rate may be a by-product, an incidental consequence, of a policy adopted for reasons that have nothing to do with protectionism. The world is a complicated place to live in.

Then referring to a passage of mine in which I made a similar point, Scott comments.

The term ‘motive’ seems to play a role in the passage above:

If the motive for the real devaluation was to protect tradables, then the current account surplus will be only a by-product, leading to more accumulation of foreign exchange reserves than the country’s monetary authority really wanted. Alternatively, if the motive for the real devaluation was to build up the foreign-exchange reserves – or to stop their decline – then the protection of tradables will be the by-product.

Scott doesn’t like talking about “motives.”

As an economist, references to “motives” make me very uncomfortable. Let’s take the example of China. Did China’s government try to reduce the real value of the yuan because they saw what happened during the 1997 SE Asia crisis, and wanted a big war chest in case they faced a balance of payments crisis? Or did they do the weak yuan policy to shift resources from domestic industries to tradable goods industries? I have absolutely no idea, nor do I see why it matters. Surely if a concept of currency manipulation has any coherent meaning, it cannot depend on the motive of the policymakers in a particular country? We aren’t mind readers. This is especially true if we are to believe that currency manipulation hurts other countries, as its proponent seem to suggest. How will it be identified?

Scott is mixing up a lot of different issues here, so let me try to sort them out. There are indeed two plausible explanations for China’s vast accumulation of foreign-exchange reserves in the 1990s and in the 20 aughts. One is a precautionary build-up of foreign-exchange reserves to be available in the event of a financial crisis; the other is exchange-rate protection, aka currency manipulation. It’s true; we can’t read the minds of the policy makers, but we can make reasonable assessments of the relative plausibility of either hypothesis, based on the size of the accumulation, the policy steps that were taken to implement and facilitate the accumulation, the public pronouncements of relevant officials, and, if we had access to them, the internal documents upon which policy-makers relied in reaching their decisions. Now obviously, the Chinese government is not about to share their internal documents with me or any outside investigator, but that is a choice made by the Chinese, not some inherent deficiency in the evidence upon which a diligent researcher could potentially rely in making a determination about the motivation for Chinese policy decisions. As an economic historian of considerable accomplishment, Scott is well aware of the kind of evidence that is relevant to evaluating the motives of policy makers, so I can’t help but suspect that Scott is playfully engaging in a bit of rhetorical obfuscation here.

In the spirit of Bastiat, consider the following analogy. Suppose that for years we had been buying bananas from Colombia for 10 cents a pound. American consumers got to eat lots of cheap tasty fruit, which don’t grow well in non-tropical countries. Then in 2018, Trump sends a team of investigators down to Colombia, and finds out that we’ve been scammed. It’s actually not a warm country, indeed quite cool due to its high elevation. The Colombian government had spent millions building giant greenhouses to grow bananas. We’ve been tricked into buying all these cheap bananas from Colombia, which artificially created a “competitive advantage” in the banana industry through subsidies.

Here’s my question: Why does it matter why the Colombian bananas were cheap? If we benefited from buying the bananas at 10 cents a pound, why would we care if the price reflected true competitive advantage or government subsidy? Does the US benefit from buying 10-cent bananas, or not?

Once again, there’s some tactical diversion taking place. The question at hand is whether a protectionist policy could, in principle, be implemented through monetary policy. The answer is clearly yes. But Scott is now inviting us to consider a different question: Do protectionist policies adopted by one country adversely affect people in other countries. The answer is: it depends. Since there are no bananas grown in the US, export subsidies by the Colombian government to their banana growers would not harm any Americans. However, if there were US banana growers who had invested in banana trees and other banana-growing assets, there would be Americans harmed by the Colombian subsidies. It is possible that the gains to American banana consumers might outweigh the losses to American banana growers, but then there would have to be some comparison of the relative gains and losses.

Now Scott comes back to his demand for a definition.

But that’s not all. Even if you convinced me that we should worry about interventionist policies in our trading partners, I’d still want a definition of currency manipulation. There are a billion ways that a foreign government could influence a real exchange rate. Which ones are “manipulation”? It’s meaningless to talk about China depreciating its currency, without explaining HOW. A currency is just a price, and reasoning from a currency change (real or nominal) is simply reasoning from a price change. Which specific actions constitute currency manipulation? I don’t want motives, I need verifiable actions. And [why] does this concept have to involve a current account surplus? Australia’s been running CA deficits for as long as I can remember. Suppose the Aussie government did enough “currency manipulation” to reduce their trend CA deficit from 4% of GDP to 2% of GDP. But it was still a deficit. Would that be “manipulation”. Why or why not?

OK, here it is: currency manipulation occurs when a government/monetary authority sets a particular nominal exchange-rate target which, it believes, will, at current domestic prices, give its export- and import-competing industries a competitive advantage over their foreign competitors, thereby generating a current account surplus. In addition, to prevent the influx of foreign cash associated with current account surplus from raising domestic non-tradable prices and undermining the competitive advantage of the protected tradable-goods sector, the government/monetary authority either restricts the amount of base money created or, more likely, increases reserve requirements imposed on the banking system to create a persistent excess demand for money, thereby ensuring a continuing current account surplus and accumulation of foreign exchange reserves and preserving the protected position of the tradable-goods sector.

Scott continues:

Should we care why a country has a big CA surplus? Suppose Switzerland has a big CA surplus due to high private saving rates, Singapore has a big CA surplus due to high public saving in common stocks, and China has a CA surplus due to high public saving in foreign exchange. What difference does it make? (And I haven’t even addressed Ricardian equivalence, which further clouds these distinctions.)

Whether we should care or not care about exchange-rate protection is a question no different from whether we should care about protection by tariffs or quotas. There is an argument for unilateral free trade, but most of the post-World-War II trend toward (somewhat) freer trade has been predicated on the idea of reciprocal reductions in trade barriers. If we believe in the reciprocal reduction of trade barriers, then it is not unreasonable to be concerned about trade barriers that are erected through currency manipulation as a substitute for the tarrifs, import quotas, and export subsidies prohibited under reciprocal trade agreements. If Scott is not interested in reciprocal trade agreements, that’s fine, but it is not unreasonable for those who are interested in reciprocal trade agreements to be concerned about covertly protectionist policies that are imposed as substitutes for tariffs, import quotas, and export subsidies.

We know that the only way that governments can affect the real exchange rate is by enacting policies that impact national saving or national investment. But almost all policies impact either national saving or national investment. So which of those count as manipulation? Is it merely policies that lead to the accumulation of foreign exchange? If so, then won’t you simply encourage countries to use some other technique for boosting national saving? An alternative policy that avoids having them be labeled currency manipulators?

In principle, there could be other policies aimed at increasing national savings that are protectionist in intent. One would have to look at each possible instance and evaluate it. At least that’s what would have to be done if one believes in reciprocal trade agreements.

There were some other points that Scott mentioned in his post that I will not address now, because the hour is late and I’m getting tired. Perhaps I’ll follow up with a short follow-up post in a day or so. Not promising though.

What’s Wrong with the Price-Specie-Flow Mechanism, Part III: Friedman and Schwartz on the Great US Inflation of 1933

Published July 29, 2017 currency manipulation , Deirdre McCloskey , exchange rate protection , Hawtrey , Max Corden , Milton Friedman , Richard Zecher 11 Comments
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I have been writing recently about two great papers by McCloskey and Zecher (“How the Gold Standard Really Worked” and “The Success of Purchasing Power Parity”) on the gold standard and the price-specie-flow mechanism (PSFM). This post, for the time being at any rate, will be the last in the series. My main topic in this post is the four-month burst of inflation in the US from April through July of 1933, an episode that largely escaped the notice of Friedman and Schwartz in their Monetary History  of the US, an omission criticized by McCloskey and Zecher in their purchasing-power-parity paper. (I will mention parenthetically that the 1933 inflation was noticed and its importance understood by R. G. Hawtrey in the second (1933) edition of his book Trade Depression and the Way Out and by Scott Sumner in his 2015 book The Midas Paradox. Both Hawtrey and Sumner emphasize the importance of the aborted 1933 recovery as have Jalil and Rua in an important recent paper.) In his published comment on the purchasing-power-parity paper, Friedman (pp. 157-62) responded to the critique by McCloskey and Zecher, and I will look carefully at that response below. But before discussing Friedman’s take on the 1933 inflation, I want to make four general comments about the two McCloskey and Zecher papers.

My first comment concerns an assertion made in a couple of places in which they interpret balance-of-payments surpluses or deficits under a fixed-exchange-rate regime as the mechanism by which excess demands for (supplies of) money in one country are accommodated by way of a balance-of-payments surpluses (deficits). Thus, given a fixed exchange rate between country A and country B, if the quantity of money in country A is less than the amount that the public in country A want to hold, the amount of money held in country A will be increased as the public, seeking to add to their cash holdings, collectively spend less than their income, thereby generating an export surplus relative to country B, and inducing a net inflow of country B’s currency into country A to be converted into country A’s currency at the fixed exchange rate. The argument is correct, but it glosses over a subtle point: excess supplies of, and excess demands for, money in this context are not absolute, but comparative. Money flows into whichever country has the relatively larger excess demand for money. Both countries may have an absolute excess supply of money, but the country with the comparatively smaller excess supply of money will nevertheless experience a balance-of-payments surplus and an inflow of cash.

My second comment is that although McCloskey and Zecher are correct to emphasize that the quantity of money in a country operating with a fixed exchange is endogenous, they fail to mention explicitly that, apart from the balance-of-payments mechanism under fixed exchange rates, the quantity of domestically produced inside money is endogenous, because there is a domestic market mechanism that adjusts the amount of inside money supplied by banks to the amount of inside money demanded by the public. Thus, under a fixed-exchange-rate regime, the quantity of inside money and the quantity of outside money are both endogenously determined, the quantity of inside money being determined by domestic forces, and the quantity of outside money determined by international forces operating through the balance-of-payments mechanism.

Which brings me to my third comment. McCloskey and Zecher have a two-stage argument. The first stage is that commodity arbitrage effectively constrains the prices of tradable goods in all countries linked by international trade. Not all commodities are tradable, and even tradable goods may be subject to varying limits — based on varying ratios of transportation costs to value — on the amount of price dispersion consistent with the arbitrage constraint. The second stage of their argument is that insofar as the prices of tradable goods are constrained by arbitrage, the rest of the price system is also effectively constrained, because economic forces constrain all relative prices to move toward their equilibrium values. So if the nominal prices of tradable goods are fixed by arbitrage, the tendency of relative prices between non-tradables and tradables to revert to their equilibrium values must constrain the nominal prices of non-tradable goods to move in the same direction as tradable-goods prices are moving. I don’t disagree with this argument in principle, but it’s subject to at least two qualifications.

First, monetary policy can alter spending patterns; if the monetary authority wishes, it can accumulate the inflow of foreign exchange that results when there is a domestic excess demand for money rather than allow the foreign-exchange inflow to increase the domestic money stock. If domestic money mostly consists of inside money supplied by private banks, preventing an increase in the quantity of inside money may require increasing the legal reserve requirements to which banks are subject. By not allowing the domestic money stock to increase in response to a foreign-exchange inflow, the central bank effectively limits domestic spending, thereby reducing the equilibrium ratio between the prices of non-tradables and tradables. A monetary policy that raises the relative price of tradables to non-tradables was called exchange-rate protection by the eminent Australian economist Max Corden. Although term “currency manipulation” is chronically misused to refer to any exchange-rate depreciation, the term is applicable to the special case in which exchange-rate depreciation is combined with a tight monetary policy thereby sustaining a reduced exchange rate.

Second, Although McCloskey and Zecher are correct that equilibrating forces normally cause the prices of non-tradables to move in the direction toward which arbitrage is forcing the prices of tradables to move, such equilibrating processes need not always operate powerfully. Suppose, to go back to David Hume’s classic thought experiment, the world is on a gold standard and the amount of gold in Britain is doubled while the amount of gold everywhere else is halved, so that the total world stock of gold is unchanged, just redistributed from the rest of the world to Britain. Under the PSFM view of the world, prices instantaneously double in Britain and fall by half in the rest of the world, and it only by seeking bargains in the rest of the world that Britain gradually exports gold to import goods from the rest of the world. Prices gradually fall in Britain and rise in the rest of the world; eventually (and as a first approximation) prices and the distribution of gold revert back to where they were originally. Alternatively, in the arbitrage view of the world, the prices of tradables don’t change, because in the world market for tradables, neither the amount of output nor the amount of gold has changed, so why should the price of tradables change? But if prices of tradables don’t change, does that mean that the prices of non-tradables won’t change? McCloskey and Zecher argue that if arbitrage prevents the prices of tradables from changing, the equilibrium relationship between the prices of tradables and non-tradables will also prevent the prices of non-tradables from changing.

I agree that the equilibrium relationship between the prices of tradables and non-tradables imposes some constraint on the movement of the prices of non-tradables, but the equilibrium relationship between the prices of tradables and non-tradables is not necessarily a constant. If people in Britain suddenly have more gold in their pockets, and they can buy all the tradable goods they want at unchanged prices, they may well increase their demand for non-tradables, causing the prices of British non-tradables to rise relative to the prices of tradables. The terms of trade will shift in Britain’s favor. Nevertheless, it would be very surprising if the price of non-tradables were to double, even momentarily, as the Humean PSFM argument suggests. Just because arbitrage does not strictly constrain the price of non-tradables does not mean that the appropriate default assumption is that the prices of non-tradables would rise by as much as suggested by a naïve quantity-theoretic PSFM extrapolation. Thus, the way to think of the common international price level under a fixed-exchange-rate regime is that the national price levels are linked by arbitrage, so that movements in national price levels are highly — but not necessarily perfectly — correlated.

My fourth comment is terminological. As Robert Lipsey (pp. 151-56) observes in his published comment about the McCloskey-Zecher paper on purchasing power parity (PPP), when the authors talk about PPP, they usually have in mind the narrower concept of the law of one price which says that commodity arbitrage keeps the prices of the same goods at different locations from deviating by more than the cost of transportation. Thus, a localized increase in the quantity of money at any location cannot force up the price of that commodity at that location by an amount exceeding the cost of transporting that commodity from the lowest cost alternative source of supply of that commodity. The quantity theory of money cannot operate outside the limits imposed by commodity arbitrage. That is the fundamental mistake underlying the PSFM.

PPP is a weaker proposition than the law of one price, refering to the relationship between exchange rates and price indices. If domestic price indices in two locations with different currencies rise by different amounts, PPP says that the expected change in the exchange rate between the two currencies is proportional to relative change in the price indices. But PPP is only an approximate relationship, while the law of one price is, within the constraints of transportation costs, an exact relationship. If all goods are tradable and transportation costs are zero, prices of all commodities sold in both locations will be equal. However, the price indices for the two location will not have the same composition, goods not being produced or consumed in the same proportions in the two locations. Thus, even if all goods sold in both locations sell at the same prices the price indices for the two locations need not change by the same proportions. If the price of a commodity exported by country A goes up relative to the price of the good exported by country B, the exchange rate between the two countries will change even if the law of one price is always satisfied. As I argued in part II of this series on PSFM, it was this terms-of-trade effect that accounted for the divergence between American and British price indices in the aftermath of the US resumption of gold convertibility in 1879. The law of one price can hold even if PPP doesn’t.

With those introductory comments out of the way, let’s now examine the treatment of the 1933 inflation in the Monetary History. The remarkable thing about the account of the 1933 inflation given by Friedman and Schwartz is that they treat it as if it were a non-event. Although industrial production increased by over 45% in a four-month period, accompanied by a 14% rise in wholesale prices, Friedman and Schwartz say almost nothing about the episode. Any mention of the episode is incidental to their description of the longer cyclical movements described in Chapter 9 of the Monetary History entitled “Cyclical Changes, 1933-41.” On p. 493, they observe: “the most notable feature of the revival after 1933 was not its rapidity but its incompleteness,” failing to mention that the increase of over 45% in industrial production from April to July was the largest increase industrial production over any four-month period (or even any 12-month period) in American history. In the next paragraph, Friedman and Schwartz continue:

The revival was initially erratic and uneven. Reopening of the banks was followed by rapid spurt in personal income and industrial production. The spurt was intensified by production in anticipation of the codes to be established under the National Industrial Recovery Act (passed June 16, 1933), which were expected to raise wage rates and prices, and did. (pp. 493-95)

Friedman and Schwartz don’t say anything about the suspension of convertibility by FDR and the devaluation of the dollar, all of which caused wholesale prices to rise immediately and substantially (14% in four months). It is implausible to think that the huge increase in industrial production and in wholesale prices was caused by the anticipation of increased wages and production quotas that would take place only after the NIRA was implemented, i.e., not before August. The reopening of the banks may have had some effect, but it is hard to believe that the effect would have accounted for more than a small fraction of the total increase or that it would have had a continuing effect over a four-month period. In discussing the behavior of prices, Friedman and Schwartz, write matter-of-factly:

Like production, wholesale prices first spurted in early 1933, partly for the same reason – in anticipation of the NIRA codes – partly under the stimulus of depreciation in the foreign exchange value of the dollar. (p. 496)

This statement is troubling for two reasons: 1) it seems to suggest that anticipation of the NIRA codes was at least as important as dollar depreciation in accounting for the rise in wholesale prices; 2) it implies that depreciation of the dollar was no more important than anticipation of the NIRA codes in accounting for the increase in industrial production. Finally, Friedman and Schwartz assess the behavior of prices and output over the entire 1933-37 expansion.

What accounts for the greater rise in wholesale prices in 1933-37, despite a probably higher fraction of the labor force unemployed and of physical capacity unutilized than in the two earlier expansions [i.e., 1879-82, 1897-1900]? One factor, already mentioned, was devaluation with its differential effect on wholesale prices. Another was almost surely the explicit measures to raise prices and wages undertaken with government encouragement and assistance, notably, NIRA, the Guffey Coal Act, the agricultural price-support program, and National Labor Relations Act. The first two were declared unconstitutional and lapsed, but they had some effect while in operation; the third was partly negated by Court decisions and then revised, but was effective throughout the expansion; the fourth, along with the general climate of opinion it reflected, became most important toward the end of the expansion.

There has been much discussion in recent years of a wage-price spiral or price-wage spiral as an explanation of post-World War II price movements. We have grave doubts that autonomous changes in wages and prices played an important role in that period. There seems to us a much stronger case for a wage-price or price-wage spiral interpretation of 1933-37 – indeed this is the only period in the near-century we cover for which such an explanation seems clearly justified. During those years there were autonomous forces raising wages and prices. (p. 498)

McCloskey and Zecher explain the implausibility of the idea that the 1933 burst of inflation (mostly concentrated in the April-July period) that largely occurred before NIRA was passed and almost completely occurred before the NIRA was implemented could be attributed to the NIRA.

The chief factual difficulties with the notion that the official cartels sanctioned by the NRA codes caused a rise in the general price level is that most of the NRA codes were not enacted until after the price rise. Ante hoc ergo non propter hoc. Look at the plot of wholesale prices of 1933 in figure 2.3 (retail prices, including such nontradables as housing, show a similar pattern). Most of the rise occurs in May, June, and July of 1933, but the NIRA was not even passed until June. A law passed, furthermore, is not a law enforced. However eager most businessmen must have been to cooperate with a government intent on forming monopolies, the formation took time. . . .

By September 1933, apparently before the approval of most NRA codes — and, judging from the late coming of compulsion, before the effective approval of agricultural codes-three-quarters of the total rise in wholesale prices and more of the total rise in retail food prices from March 1933 to the average of 1934 was complete. On the face of it, at least, the NRA is a poor candidate for a cause of the price rise. It came too late.

What came in time was the depreciation of the dollar, a conscious policy of the Roosevelt administration from the beginning. . . . There was certainly no contemporaneous price rise abroad to explain the 28-percent rise in American wholesale prices (and in retail food prices) between April 1933 and the high point in September 1934. In fact, in twenty-five countries the average rise was only 2.2 percent, with the American rise far and away the largest.

It would appear, in short, that the economic history of 1933 cannot be understood with a model closed to direct arbitrage. The inflation was no gradual working out of price-specie flow; less was it an inflation of aggregate demand. It happened quickly, well before most other New Deal policies (and in particular the NRA) could take effect, and it happened about when and to the extent that the dollar was devalued. By the standard of success in explaining major events, parity here works. (pp. 141-43)

In commenting on the McCloskey-Zecher paper, Friedman responds to their criticism of account of the 1933 inflation presented in the Monetary History. He quibbles about the figure in which McCloskey and Zecher showed that US wholesale prices were highly correlated with the dollar/sterling exchange rate after FDR suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold in April, complaining that chart leaves the impression that the percentage increase in wholesale prices was as large as the 50% decrease in the dollar/sterling exchange rate, when in fact it was less than a third as large. A fair point, but merely tangential to the main issue: explaining the increase in wholesale prices. The depreciation in the dollar can explain the increase in wholesale prices even if the increase in wholesale prices is not as great as the depreciation of the dollar. Friedman continues:

In any event, as McCloskey and Zecher note, we pointed out in A Monetary History that there was a direct effect of devaluation on prices. However, the existence of a direct effect on wholesale prices is not incompatible with the existence of many other prices, as Moe Abramovitz has remarked, such as non-tradable-goods prices, that did not respond immediately or responded to different forces. An index of rents paid plotted against the exchange rate would not give the same result. An index of wages would not give the same result. (p. 161)

In saying that the Monetary History acknowledged that there was a direct effect of devaluation on prices, Friedman is being disingenuous; by implication at least, the Monetary History suggests that the importance of the NIRA for rising prices and output even in the April to July 1933 period was not inferior to the effect of devaluation on prices and output. Though (belatedly) acknowledging the primary importance of devaluation on wholesale prices, Friedman continues to suggest that factors other than devaluation could have accounted for the rise in wholesale prices — but (tellingly) without referring to the NIRA. Friedman then changes the subject to absence of devaluation effects on the prices of non-tradable goods and on wages. Thus, he is left with no substantial cause to explain the sudden rise in US wholesale prices between April and July 1933 other than the depreciation of the dollar, not the operation of PSFM. Friedman and Schwartz could easily have consulted Hawtrey’s definitive contemporaneous account of the 1933 inflation, but did not do so, referring only once to Hawtrey in the Monetary History (p. 99) in connection with changes by the Bank of England in Bank rate in 1881-82.

Having been almost uniformly critical of Friedman, I would conclude with a word on his behalf. In the context of Great Depression, I think there are good reasons to think that devaluation would not necessarily have had a significant effect on wages and the prices of non-tradables. At the bottom of a downturn, it’s likely that relative prices are far from their equilibrium values. So if we think of devaluation as a mechanism for recovery and restoring an economy to the neighborhood of equilibrium, we would not expect to see prices and wages rising uniformly. So if, for the sake of argument, we posit that real wages were in some sense too high at the bottom of the recession, we would not necessarily expect that a devaluation would cause wages (or the prices of non-tradables) to rise proportionately with wholesale prices largely determined in international markets. Friedman actually notes that the divergence between the increase of wholesale prices and the increase in the implicit price deflator in 1933-37 recovery was larger than in the 1879-82 or the 1897-99 recoveries. The magnitude of the necessary relative price adjustment in the 1933-37 episode may have been substantially greater than it was in either of the two earlier episodes.

What Is This Thing Called “Currency Manipulation?”

Published June 28, 2017 Bank of France , currency manipulation , exchange rate protection , Max Corden , Scott Sumner 12 Comments

Over the past few years, I have written a number of posts (e.g., here, here and here) posing — and trying to answer — the question: what is this strange thing called “currency manipulation?” I have to admit that I was actually moderately pleased with myself for having applied ideas developed by the eminent Australian international-trade and monetary economist Max Corden in a classic paper called “Exchange Rate Protection.” Unfortunately, my efforts don’t seem to have pleased – even minimally – Scott Sumner who, in a recent post in his Econlog blog, takes me to task for applying the term to China.

Now I get why Scott doesn’t like the term “currency manipulation.” The term is thrown around indiscriminately all the time as if its meaning were obvious. But the meaning is far from obvious. The term is also an invitation for demagogic abuse, which is another reason for being wary about using it.

A country can peg its exchange rate in terms of some other currency, or allow its exchange rate against all other currencies to float, or it can do a little of both, seeking to influence its exchange rate intermittently depending upon a variety of factors and objectives. A pegged exchange rate may be called a form of intervention (which is not — repeat not —  a synonym for “manipulation”), but if the monetary authority takes its currency peg seriously, it makes the currency peg the overriding determinant of its monetary policy. It is not the only element of its monetary policy, because the monetary authority has another policy objective that it can pursue simultaneously, namely, its holdings of foreign-exchange reserves. If the monetary authority adopts a tight monetary policy, it gains reserves, and if it adopts a loose policy it loses reserves. What constrains a monetary authority with a fixed-exchange rate in loosening policy is the amount of reserves that it is prepared to forego to maintain that exchange rate, and what constrains the monetary authority in tightening its policy is the interest income that must forego in accumulating non-interest-bearing, or low-interest-bearing, foreign-exchange reserves.

What distinguishes “currency manipulation” from mere “currency intervention?” Borrowing Max Corden’s idea of exchange-rate protection, I argued in previous posts that currency manipulation occurs when, in order to favor its tradable-goods sector (i.e., exporting and import-competing industries), a monetary authority (like the Bank of France in 1928) chooses an undervalued currency peg corresponding to a low real exchange rate, or intervenes in currency markets to reduce its nominal exchange rate, while tightening monetary policy to slow down the rise of domestic prices that normally follows a reduced nominal exchange rate. Corden points out that, as a protectionist strategy, exchange-rate protection is inferior to simply raising tariffs on imports or subsidizing exports. However, if international agreements make it difficult to raise tariffs and subsidize exports, exchange-rate protection may become the best available protectionist option.

In his post, “Nominal exchange rates, real exchange rates and protectionism,” Sumner denies that the idea of currency manipulation, and, presumably, the idea of exchange-rate protection make any sense. Here’s what Scott has to say:

The three concepts mentioned in the title of the post are completely unrelated to each other. So unrelated that the subjects ought not even be taught in the same course. The nominal exchange rate is a monetary concept. Real exchange rates belong in course on the real side of macro, perhaps including public finance. And protectionism belongs in a (micro) trade course.

The nominal exchange rate is the relative price of two monies. It’s determined by the monetary policies of the two countries in question. It plays no role in trade.

Scott often cites sticky prices as an important assumption of macroeconomics, so I don’t understand why he thinks that the nominal exchange rate has no effect on trade. If prices do not all instantaneously adjust to a change in the nominal exchange rate, changes in nominal exchange rates are also changes in real exchange rates until prices adjust fully to the new exchange rate.

Protectionism is a set of policies (such as tariffs and quotas) that drives a wedge between domestic and foreign prices. Protectionist policies reduce both imports and exports. They might also slightly affect the current account balance, but that’s a second order effect.

A protectionist policy causes resources from the non-tradable-goods sector to shift to the tradable-goods sector, favoring some domestic producers and disfavoring others, as well as favoring workers specialized to the tradable-goods sector. Whether it affects the trade balance depends on how the policy is implemented, so I agree that raising tariffs doesn’t automatically affect the trade balance. To determine whether and how the trade balance is affected, one has to make further assumptions about the distributional effects of the policy and about the budgetary and monetary policies accompanying the policy. Causation can go in either direction from real exchange rate to trade balance or from trade balance to real exchange rate.

In the following quotation, Scott ignores the relationship between the real exchange rate and the relative pricesof tradables and non-tradables. Protectionist policies, by increasing the relative price of tradables to non-tradables, shift resources from the non-tradable-goods to the tradable-goods sector. That’s the sense in which, contrary to Scott’s assertion, a low real-exchange rate makes enhances the competitiveness of one country relative to other countries. The cost of production in the domestic tradable-goods sector is reduced relative to the price of tradable goods, making the tradable-goods sector more competitive in the markets in which domestic producers compete with foreign producers. I don’t say that increasing the competitiveness of the domestic tradable-goods sector is a good idea, but it is not meaningless to talk about international competitiveness.

Real exchange rates influence the trade balance. When there is a change in either domestic saving or domestic investment, the real exchange rate must adjust to produce an equivalent change in the current account balance. A policy aimed at a bigger current account surplus is not “protectionist”, as it does not generally reduce imports and exports, nor does it drive a wedge between domestic and foreign prices. It affects the gap between imports and exports. . . .

A low real exchange rate is sometimes called a “competitive advantage”, although the concept has absolutely nothing to do with either competition or advantages. It’s simply a reflection of an imbalance between domestic saving and domestic investment. These imbalances also occur within countries, and no one ever worries about regional “deficits”. But for some odd reason at the national level they become a cause for concern. Some of this is based on the mercantilist fallacy that exports are good and imports are bad.

This is where Scott turns his attention to me.

Here’s David Glasner:

Currency manipulation has become a favorite bugbear of critics of both monetary policy and trade policy. Some claim that countries depress their exchange rates to give their exporters an unfair advantage in foreign markets and to insulate their domestic producers from foreign competition. Others claim that using monetary policy as a way to stimulate aggregate demand is necessarily a form of currency manipulation, because monetary expansion causes the currency whose supply is being expanded to depreciate against other currencies, making monetary expansion, ipso facto, a form of currency manipulation.

As I have already explained in a number of posts (e.g., here, here, and here) a theoretically respectable case can be made for the possibility that currency manipulation can be used as a form of covert protectionism without imposing either tariffs, quotas or obviously protectionist measures to favor the producers of one country against their foreign competitors.

I disagree with this. There is no theoretically respectable case for the argument that currency manipulation can be used as protectionism. But I would go much further; there is no intellectually respectable definition of currency manipulation.

Well, my only response is that I consider Max Corden to be just about the most theoretically-respectable economist alive. So let me quote at length from Corden’s essay “Macroeconomic and Industrial Policies” reprinted in his volume Protection, Growth and Trade (pp. 288-301)

There is clearly a relationship between macroeconomic policy and industrial policy on the foreign trade side. . . . The nominal exchange rate is an instrument of macroeconomic policy, while tariffs, import quotas, export subsidies and taxes and voluntary export restraints can all be regarded as instruments of industrial policy. Yet an exchange-rate change can have “industrial” effects. It therefore seems useful to clarify the relationship between exchange-rate policy and the various micro or industrial-policy instruments.

The first step is to distinguish a nominal from a real exchange-rate change and to introduce the concept of “exchange-rate protection. . . . If the exchange rate depreciates to the same extent as all costs and prices are rising (relative to costs and prices in other countries) there may be no real change at all. The nominal exchange rate is a monetary phenomenon, and it is possible that it is no more than that. A monetary authority may engineer a nominal devaluation designed to raise the domestic currency prices of exports and import-competing goods, and hence to benefit these industries. But if nominal wages quickly rise to compensate for the higher tradable-goods prices, no real effects – no rises in the absolute and relative profitability of tradable-goods industries – will remain. Monetary policy can influence the nominal-exchange rate, and possibly can even maintain it at a fixed value, but it cannot necessarily affect the real exchange rate. The real exchange rate refers to the relative price of tradable and non-tradable goods. While its absolute value is difficult to measure because of the ambiguity of the distinction between tradable and non-tradable goods, changes in it are usually – and reasonably – measured or indicated by relating changes in the nominal exchange rate to changes in some index of domestic prices or costs, or possibly to the average nominal wage level. This is sometimes called an index of competitiveness.

A nominal devaluation will devalue the real exchange rate if there is some rigidity or sluggishness either in the prices of non-tradables or in nominal wages. The nominal devaluation will then raise the prices of tradables relative to wage costs and to labour-intensive non-tradables. Thus it protects tradables. This is “exchange-rate protection”. It protects the whole group of tradables relative to non-tradables. It will tnd ot shift resources into tradables out of non-tradables and domestic demand in the opposite direction. If at the same time macroeconomic policy ensures a demand-supply balance for non-tradables – hence decreasing aggregate demand (absorption) in real terms appropriately – a balance of payments surplus (or at least a lesser deficit than before) will result. This refers to the balance of payments on current account since the concurrent fiscal and monetary policies can have varying effects on private capital inflow.

If the motive for the real devaluation was to protect tradables, then the current account surplus will be only a by-product, leading ot more accumulation of foreign exchange reserves than the country’s monetary authority really wanted. Alternatively, if the motive for the real devaluation was to build up the foreign-exchange reserves – or to stop their decline – then the protection of tradables will be the by-product.

The main point to make is that a real exchange-rate change has effects on the relative and absolute profitability of different industries, a real devaluation favouring tradables relative to non-tradables, and a real appreciation the opposite. A nominal exchange-rate change can thus serve an industrial-policy purpose, provided it can be turned into a real exchange-rate change and that the incidental effects on the balance of payments are accepted.

This does not mean that it is an optimal form of industrial policy. . . . [P]rotection policy could be directed more precisely to the industries to be protected, avoiding the by-product effect of an undesired balance-of-payments surplus; and in any case it can be argued that defensive protection policy is unlikely to be optimal, positive adjustment policy being preferable. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to find examples of countries that have practiced exchange-rate protection, if implicitly. They have intervened in the foreign-exchange market to prevent an appreciation of the exchange rate that might otherwise have taken place – or at least, they have “leaned against the wind.” – not because they really wanted to build up foreign-exchange reserves, but because they wanted to protect their tradable-goods industries – usually mainly their export industries.

Scott again quotes me and then comments:

And the most egregious recent example of currency manipulation was undertaken by the Chinese central bank when it effectively pegged the yuan to the dollar at a fixed rate. Keeping its exchange rate fixed against the dollar was precisely the offense that the currency-manipulation police accused the Chinese of committing.

Because currency manipulation does not exist as a coherent concept, I don’t see any evidence that the Chinese did it. But if I am wrong and it does exist, then it surely refers to the real exchange rate, not the nominal rate. Thus the fact that the nominal value of the Chinese yuan was pegged for a period of time has no relevance to whether the currency was being “manipulated”. The real value of the yuan was appreciating.

One cannot conclude that an appreciating yuan means that China was not manipulating its currency. As I pointed out above, and as Corden explains, exchange-rate protection is associated with the accumulation of foreign-exchange reserves by the central bank. There is an ambiguity in interpreting the motivation of the central bank that is accumulating foreign-exchange reserves. Is it accumulating because it wants to increase the amount of reserves in its vaults, or are the increased holdings merely an unwelcome consequence of a policy being pursued for other reasons? In either case, the amount of foreign-exchange reserves a central bank is willing to hold is not unlimited. When the pile of reserves gets high enough, the policy causing accumulation may start to change, implying that the real exchange rate will start to rise.

The dollar was pegged to gold from 1879 to 1933, and yet I don’t think the US government was “manipulating” the exchange rate. And if it was, it was not by fixing the gold price peg, it would have been by depreciating the real value of the dollar via policies that increased national saving, or reduced national investment, in order to run a current account surplus. In my view it is misleading to call policies that promote national saving “currency manipulation”, and even more so to put that label on just a subset of pro-saving policies.

As in the case of the Bank of France after 1928, with a fixed exchange rate, whether a central bank is guilty of currency manipulation depends on whether the initial currency peg was chosen with a view toward creating a competitive advantage for the country’s tradable-goods sector. That was clearly an important motivation when the Bank of France chose the conversion rate between gold and the franc. I haven’t studied the choice of the dollar peg to gold in 1879.

If economists want to use the term ‘currency manipulation’, then they first need to define the term. I have not seen any definitions that make any sense.

I’m hoping that Corden’s definition works for Scott. It does for me.

A Tutorial for Judy Shelton on the ABCs of Currency Manipulation

Published February 15, 2017 currency manipulation , exchange rate protection , Judy Shelton 13 Comments
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Currency manipulation has become a favorite bugbear of critics of both monetary policy and trade policy. Some claim that countries depress their exchange rates to give their exporters an unfair advantage in foreign markets and to insulate their domestic producers from foreign competition. Others claim that using monetary policy as a way to stimulate aggregate demand is necessarily a form of currency manipulation, because monetary expansion causes the currency whose supply is being expanded to depreciate against other currencies, making monetary expansion, ipso facto, a form of currency manipulation.

As I have already explained in a number of posts (e.g., here, here, and here) a theoretically respectable case can be made for the possibility that currency manipulation can be used as a form of covert protectionism without imposing either tariffs, quotas or obviously protectionist measures to favor the producers of one country against their foreign competitors. All of this was explained by the eminent international trade theorist Max Corden  over 30 years ago in a famous paper (“Exchange Rate Protection”). But to be able to make a credible case that currency manipulation is being practiced, it has to be shown that currency depreciation has been coupled with a restrictive monetary policy – either by reducing the supply of, or by increasing the demand for, base money. The charge that monetary expansion is ever a form of currency manipulation is therefore suspect on its face, and those who make accusations that countries are engaging in currency manipulation rarely bother to support the charge with evidence that currency deprection is being coupled with a restrictive monetary policy.

So it was no surprise to see in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal that monetary-policy entrepreneur Dr. Judy Shelton has written another one of her screeds promoting the gold standard, in which, showing no awareness of the necessary conditions for currency manipulation, she assures us that a) currency manipulation is a real problem and b) that restoring the gold standard would solve it.

Certainly the rules regarding international exchange-rate arrangements are not working. Monetary integrity was the key to making Bretton Woods institutions work when they were created after World War II to prevent future breakdowns in world order due to trade. The international monetary system, devised in 1944, was based on fixed exchange rates linked to a gold-convertible dollar.

No such system exists today. And no real leader can aspire to champion both the logic and the morality of free trade without confronting the practice that undermines both: currency manipulation.

Ahem, pray tell, which rules relating to exchange-rate arrangements does Dr. Shelton believe are not working? She doesn’t cite any. And, what, on earth does “monetary integrity” even mean, and what does that high-minded, but totally amorphous, concept have to do with the rules of exchange-rate arrangements that aren’t working?

Dr. Shelton mentions “monetary integrity” in the context of the Bretton Woods system, a system based — well, sort of — on fixed exchange rates, forgetting – or choosing not — to acknowledge that, under the Bretton Woods system, exchange rates were also unilaterally adjustable by participating countries. Not only were they adjustable, but currency devaluations were implemented on numerous occasions as a strategy for export promotion, the most notorious example being Britain’s 30% devaluation of sterling in 1949, just five years after the Bretton Woods agreement had been signed. Indeed, many other countries, including West Germany, Italy, and Japan, also had chronically undervalued currencies under the Bretton Woods system, as did France after it rejoined the gold standard in 1926 at a devalued rate deliberately chosen to ensure that its export industries would enjoy a competitive advantage.

The key point to keep in mind is that for a country to gain a competitive advantage by lowering its exchange rate, it has to prevent the automatic tendency of international price arbitrage and corresponding flows of money to eliminate competitive advantages arising from movements in exchange rates. If a depreciated exchange rate gives rise to an export surplus, a corresponding inflow of foreign funds to finance the export surplus will eventually either drive the exchange rate back toward its old level, thereby reducing or eliminating the initial depreciation, or, if the lower rate is maintained, the cash inflow will accumulate in reserve holdings of the central bank. Unless the central bank is willing to accept a continuing accumulation of foreign-exchange reserves, the increased domestic demand and monetary expansion associated with the export surplus will lead to a corresponding rise in domestic prices, wages and incomes, thereby reducing or eliminating the competitive advantage created by the depressed exchange rate. Thus, unless the central bank is willing to accumulate foreign-exchange reserves without limit, or can create an increased demand by private banks and the public to hold additional cash, thereby creating a chronic excess demand for money that can be satisfied only by a continuing export surplus, a permanently reduced foreign-exchange rate creates only a transitory competitive advantage.

I don’t say that currency manipulation is not possible. It is not only possible, but we know that currency manipulation has been practiced. But currency manipulation can occur under a fixed-exchange rate regime as well as under flexible exchange-rate regimes, as demonstrated by the conduct of the Bank of France from 1926 to 1935 while it was operating under a gold standard. And the most egregious recent example of currency manipulation was undertaken by the Chinese central bank when it effectively pegged the yuan to the dollar at a fixed rate. Keeping its exchange rate fixed against the dollar was precisely the offense that the currency-manipulation police accused the Chinese of committing.

When governments manipulate exchange rates to affect currency markets, they undermine the honest efforts of countries that wish to compete fairly in the global marketplace. Supply and demand are distorted by artificial prices conveyed through contrived exchange rates. Businesses fail as legitimately earned profits become currency losses.

It is no wonder that appeals to free trade prompt cynicism among those who realize the game is rigged against them. Opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership in June 2015, Rep. Debbie Dingell (D., Mich.) explained: “We can compete with anybody in the world. We build the best product. But we can’t compete with the Bank of Japan or the Japanese government.”

In other words, central banks provide useful cover for currency manipulation. Japan’s answer to the charge that it manipulates its currency for trade purposes is that movements in the exchange rate are driven by monetary policy aimed at domestic inflation and employment objectives. But there’s no denying that one of the primary “arrows” of Japan’s economic strategy under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, starting in late 2012, was to use radical quantitative easing to boost the “competitiveness” of Japan’s exports. Over the next three years, the yen fell against the U.S. dollar by some 40%.

That sounds horrible, but Dr. Shelton conveniently forgets – or declines – to acknowledge that in September 2012, the yen had reached its post-war high against the dollar. Moreover, between September 2012 and September 2015, the trade weighted US dollar index in terms of major currencies rose by almost 25%, so most of the depreciation of the yen against the dollar reflected dollar appreciation rather than yen depreciation.

Now as I pointed out in a post in 2013 about Japan, there really were reasons to suspect that the Japanese were engaging in currency manipulation even though Japan’s rapid accumulation of foreign exchange reserves that began in 2009 came to a halt in 2012 before the Bank of Japan launched its quantitative easing program. I have not kept up on what policies the Bank of Japan has been following, so I am not going to venture an opinion about whether Japan is or is not a currency manipulator. But the evidence that Dr. Shelton is providing to support her charge is simply useless and irrelevant.

Last April, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew cautioned Japan against using currency depreciation to gain a trade advantage and he placed the country on a the“monitoring list” of potential currency manipulators. But in response, Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso threatened to raise the bar, saying he was “prepared to undertake intervention” in the foreign-exchange market.

Obviously, the US government responds to pressures from domestic interests harmed by Japanese competition. Whether such back and forth between the American Treasury Secretary and his Japanese counterpart signifies anything beyond routine grandstanding I am not in a position to say.

China has long been intervening directly in the foreign-exchange market to manipulate the value of its currency. The People’s Bank of China announces a daily midpoint for the acceptable exchange rate between the yuan and the dollar, and then does not allow its currency to move more than 2% from the target price. When the value of the yuan starts to edge higher than the desired exchange rate, China’s government buys dollars to push it back down. When the yuan starts to drift lower than the desired rate, it sells off dollar reserves to buy back its own currency.

China’s government has reserves that amount to nearly $3 trillion. According to Mr. Lew, the U.S. should mute its criticism because China has spent nearly $1 trillion to cushion the yuan’s fall over the last 2½ years or so. In a veiled reproach to Mr. Trump’s intention to label China a currency manipulator, Mr. Lew said it was “analytically dangerous” to equate China’s current intervention policies with its earlier efforts to devalue its currency for purposes of gaining a trade advantage. China, he noted, would only be open to criticism that is “intellectually sound.”

Whether China is propping up exchange rates or holding them down, manipulation is manipulation and should not be overlooked. To be intellectually consistent, one must acknowledge that the distortions induced by government intervention in the foreign-exchange market affect both trade and capital flows. A country that props up the value of its currency against the dollar may have strategic goals for investing in U.S. assets.

Far from being intellectually consistent, Dr. Shelton is rushing headlong into intellectual incoherence. She has latched on to the mantra of “currency manipulation,” and she will not let go. How does Dr. Shelton imagine that the fixed exchange rates of the Bretton Woods era, for which she so fervently pines, were maintained?

I have no idea what she might be thinking, but the answer is that they were maintained by intervention into currency markets to keep exchange rates from deviating by more than a minimal amount from their target rates. So precisely the behavior that, under the Bretton Woods system, she extols wholeheartedly, she condemns mindlessly when now undertaken by the Chinese.

Again, my point is not that the Chinese have not engaged in exchange-rate protection in the past. I have actually suggested in earlier posts to which I have hyperlinked above that the Chinese have engaged in that practice. But that no longer appears to be the case, and Dr. Shelton is clearly unable to provide any evidence that the Chinese are still engaging in that practice.

 [T]he . . . first step [to take] to address this issue [is] by questioning why there aren’t adequate rules in place to keep countries from manipulating their exchange rates.

The next step is to establish a universal set of rules based on monetary sovereignty and discipline that would allow nations to voluntarily participate in a trade agreement that did not permit them to undermine true competition by manipulating exchange rates.

I have actually just offered such a rule in case Dr. Shelton is interested. But I have little hope and no expectation that she is or will be.

Currency Depreciation and Monetary Expansion Redux

Published February 25, 2016 competitive devaluation , currency manipulation , currency war , exchange rate protection , Frances Coppola , interest on reserves , Max Corden 14 Comments
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Last week Frances Coppola and I exchanged posts about competitive devaluation. Frances chided me for favoring competitive devaluation, competitive devaluation, in her view, accomplishing nothing in a world of fiat currencies, because exchange rates don’t change. Say, the US devalues the dollar by 10% against the pound and Britain devalues the pound by 10% against the dollar; it’s as if nothing happened. In reply, I pointed out that if the competitive devaluation is achieved by monetary expansion (the US buying pounds with dollars to drive up the value of the pound and the UK buying dollars with pounds to drive up the value of the dollar), the result must be  increased prices in both the US and the UK. Frances responded that our disagreement was just a semantic misunderstanding, because she was talking about competitive devaluation in the absence of monetary expansion; so it’s all good.

I am, more or less, happy with that resolution of our disagreement, but I am not quite persuaded that the disagreement between us is merely semantic, as Frances seems conflicted about Hawtrey’s argument, carried out in the context of a gold standard, which served as my proof text for the proposition that competitive devaluation really is expansionary. On the one hand, she seems to distinguish between the expansionary effect of competitive devaluation relative to gold – Hawtrey’s case – and the beggar-my-neighbor effect of competitive devaluation of fiat currencies relative to each other; on the other hand, she also intimates that even Hawtrey got it wrong in arguing that competitive devaluation is expansionary. Now, much as I admire Hawtrey, I have no problem with criticizing him; it just seems that Frances hasn’t decided whether she does – or doesn’t – agree with him.

But what I want to do in this post is not to argue with Frances, though some disagreements may be impossible to cover up; I just want to explain the relationship between competitive devaluation and monetary expansion.

First some context. One of the reasons that I — almost exactly four years ago – wrote my post about Hawtrey and competitive devaluations (aka currency wars) is that critics of quantitative easing had started to make the argument that the real point of quantitative easing was to gain a competitive advantage over other countries by depreciating – or devaluing – their currencies. What I was trying to show was that if a currency is being depreciated by monetary expansion (aka quantitative easing), then, as Frances now seems – but I’m still not sure – ready to concede, the combination of monetary expansion and currency devaluation has a net expansionary effect on the whole world, and the critics of quantitative easing are wrong. Because the competitive devaluation argument has so often been made together with a criticism of quantitative easing, I assumed, carelessly it appears, that in criticizing my post, Frances was disagreeing with my support of currency depreciation in the context of monetary expansion and quantitative easing.

With that explanatory preface out of the way, let’s think about how to depreciate a fiat currency on the foreign exchange markets. A market-clearing exchange rate between two fiat currencies can be determined in two ways (though there is often a little of both in practice): 1) a currency peg and 2) a floating rate. Under a currency peg, one or both countries are committed to buying and selling the other currency in unlimited quantities at the pegged (official) rate. If neither country is prepared to buy or sell its currency in unlimited quantities at the pegged rate, the peg is not a true peg, because the peg will not withstand a sufficient shift in the relative market demands for the currencies. If the market demand is inconsistent with the quasi-peg, either the pegged rate will cease to be a market-clearing rate, with a rationing system imposed while the appearance of a peg is maintained, or the exchange rate will be allowed to float to clear the market. A peg can be one-sided or two-sided, but a two-sided peg is possible only so long as both countries agree on the exchange rate to be pegged; if they disagree, the system goes haywire. To use Nick Rowe’s terminology, the typical case of a currency peg involves an alpha (or dominant, or reserve) currency which is taken as a standard and a beta currency which is made convertible into the alpha currency at a rate chosen by the issuer of the beta currency.

With floating currencies, the market is cleared by adjustment of the exchange rate rather than currency purchases or sales by the monetary authority to maintain the peg. In practice, monetary authorities generally do buy and sell their currencies in the market — sometimes with, and  sometimes without, an exchange-rate target — so the operation of actual foreign exchange markets lies somewhere in between the two poles of currency pegs and floating rates.

What does this tell us about currency depreciation? First, it is possible for a country to devalue its currency against another currency to which its currency is pegged by changing the peg unilaterally. If a peg is one-sided, i.e., a beta currency is tied to an alpha, the issuer of the beta currency chooses the peg unilaterally. If the peg is two-sided, then the peg cannot be changed unilaterally; the two currencies are merely different denominations of a single currency, and a unilateral change in the peg means that the common currency has been abandoned and replaced by two separate currencies.

So what happens if a beta currency pegged to an alpha currency, e.g., the Hong Kong dollar which pegged to the US dollar, is devalued? Say Hong Kong has an unemployment problem and attributes the problem to Hong Kong wages being too high for its exports to compete in world markets. Hong Kong decides to solve the problem by devaluing their dollar from 13 cents to 10 cents. Would the devaluation be expansionary or contractionary for the rest of the world?

Hong Kong is the paradigmatic small open economy. Its export prices are quoted in US dollars determined in world markets in which HK is a small player, so the prices of HK exports quoted in US dollars don’t change, but in HK dollars the prices rise by 30%. Suddenly, HK exporters become super-profitable, and hire as many workers as they can to increase output. Hong Kong’s unemployment problem is solved.

(Brief digression. There are those who reject this reasoning, because it supposedly assumes that Hong Kong workers suffer from money illusion. If workers are unemployed because their wages are too high relative to the Hong Kong producer price level, why don’t they accept a cut in nominal wages? We don’t know. But if they aren’t willing to accept a nominal-wage cut, why do they allow themselves to be tricked into accepting a real-wage cut by way of a devaluation, unless they are suffering from money illusion? And we all know that it’s irrational to suffer from money illusion, because money is neutral. The question is a good question, but the answer is that the argument for monetary neutrality and for the absence of money illusion presumes a comparison between two equilibrium states. But the devaluation analysis above did not start from an equilibrium; it started from a disequilibrium. So the analysis can’t be refuted by saying that it implies that workers suffer from money illusion.)

The result of the Hong Kong export boom and corresponding increase in output and employment is that US dollars will start flowing into Hong Kong as payment for all those exports. So the next question is what happens to those dollars? With no change in the demand of Hong Kong residents to hold US dollars, they will presumably want to exchange their US dollars for Hong Kong dollars, so that the quantity of Hong Kong dollars held by Hong Kong residents will increase. Because domestic income and expenditure in Hong Kong is rising, some of the new Hong Kong dollars will probably be held, but some will be spent. The increased spending as a result of rising incomes and a desire to convert some of the increased cash holdings into other assets will spill over into increased purchases by Hong Kong residents on imports or foreign assets. The increase in domestic income and expenditure and the increase in import prices will inevitably cause an increase in prices measured in HK dollars.

Thus, insofar as income, expenditure and prices are rising in Hong Kong, the immediate real exchange rate advantage resulting from devaluation will dissipate, though not necessarily completely, as the HK prices of non-tradables including labor services are bid up in response to the demand increase following devaluation. The increase in HK prices and increased spending by HK residents on imported goods will have an expansionary effect on the rest of the world (albeit a small one because Hong Kong is a small open economy). That’s the optimistic scenario.

But there is also a pessimistic scenario that was spelled out by Max Corden in his classic article on exchange rate protection. In this scenario, the HK monetary authority either reduces the quantity of HK dollars to offset the increase in HK dollars caused by its export surplus, or it increases the demand for HK dollars to match the increase in the quantity of HK dollars. It can reduce the quantity of HK dollars by engaging in open-market sales of domestic securities in its portfolio, and it can increase the demand for HK dollars by increasing the required reserves that HK banks must hold against the HK dollars (either deposits or banknotes) that they create. Alternatively, the monetary authority could pay interest on the reserves held by HK banks at the central bank as a way of  increasing the amount of HK dollars demanded. By eliminating the excess supply of HK dollars through one of more of these methods, the central bank prevents the increase in HK spending and the reduction in net exports that would otherwise have occurred in response to the HK devaluation. That was the great theoretical insight of Corden’s analysis: the beggar-my-neighbor effect of devaluation is not caused by the devaluation, but by the monetary policy that prevents the increase in domestic income associated with devaluation from spilling over into increased expenditure. This can only be accomplished by a monetary policy that deliberately creates a chronic excess demand for cash, an excess demand that can only be satisfied by way of an export surplus.

The effect (though just second-order) of the HK policy on US prices can also be determined, because the policy of the HK monetary authority involves an increase in its demand to hold US FX reserves. If it chooses to hold the additional dollar reserves in actual US dollars, the increase in the demand for US base money will, ceteris paribus, cause the US price level to fall. Alternatively, if the HK monetary authority chooses to hold its dollar reserves in the form of US Treasuries, the yield on those Treasuries will tend to fall. A reduced yield on Treasuries will increase the desired holdings of dollars, also implying a reduced US price level. Of course, the US is capable of nullifying the deflationary effect of HK currency manipulation by monetary expansion; the point is that the HK policy will have a (slight) deflationary effect on the US unless it is counteracted.

If I were writing a textbook, I would say that it is left as an exercise for the reader to work out the analysis of devaluation in the case of floating currencies. So if you feel like stopping here, you probably won’t be missing very much. But just to cover all the bases, I will go through the argument quickly. If a country wants to drive down the floating exchange rate between its currency and another currency, the monetary authority can buy the foreign currency in exchange for its own currency in the FX markets. It’s actually not necessary to intervene directly in FX markets to do this, issuing more currency, by open-market operations (aka quantitative easing) would also work, but the effect in FX markets will show up more quickly than if the expansion is carried out by open market purchases. So in the simplest case, currency depreciation is actually just another term for monetary expansion. However, the link between monetary expansion and currency depreciation can be broken if a central bank simultaneously buys the foreign currency with new issues of its own currency while making open-market sales of assets to mop up the home currency issued while intervening in the FX market. Alternatively, it can intervene in the FX market while imposing increased reserve requirements on banks, thereby forcing them to hold the newly issued currency, or by paying banks a sufficiently interest rate on reserves held at the central bank to willingly hold the newly issued currency.

So, it is my contention that there is no such thing as pure currency depreciation without monetary expansion. If currency depreciation is to be achieved without monetary expansion, the central bank must also simultaneously either carry out open-market sales to mop the currency issued in the process of driving down the exchange rate of the currency, or impose reserve requirements on banks, or pay interest on bank reserves, thereby creating an increased demand for the additional currency that was issued to drive down the exchange value of the home currency

Competitive Devaluation Plus Monetary Expansion Does Create a Free Lunch

Published February 17, 2016 competitive devaluation , currency manipulation , exchange rate protection , Frances Coppola , gold standard , Hawtrey , Max Corden , purchasing power parity 16 Comments
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I want to begin this post by saying that I’m flattered by, and grateful to, Frances Coppola for the first line of her blog post yesterday. But – and I note that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery – I fear I have to take issue with her over competitive devaluation.

Frances quotes at length from a quotation from Hawtrey’s Trade Depression and the Way Out that I used in a post I wrote almost four years ago. Hawtrey explained why competitive devaluation in the 1930s was – and in my view still is – not a problem (except under extreme assumptions, which I will discuss at the end of this post). Indeed, I called competitive devaluation a free lunch, providing her with a title for her post. Here’s the passage that Frances quotes:

This competitive depreciation is an entirely imaginary danger. The benefit that a country derives from the depreciation of its currency is in the rise of its price level relative to its wage level, and does not depend on its competitive advantage. If other countries depreciate their currencies, its competitive advantage is destroyed, but the advantage of the price level remains both to it and to them. They in turn may carry the depreciation further, and gain a competitive advantage. But this race in depreciation reaches a natural limit when the fall in wages and in the prices of manufactured goods in terms of gold has gone so far in all the countries concerned as to regain the normal relation with the prices of primary products. When that occurs, the depression is over, and industry is everywhere remunerative and fully employed. Any countries that lag behind in the race will suffer from unemployment in their manufacturing industry. But the remedy lies in their own hands; all they have to do is to depreciate their currencies to the extent necessary to make the price level remunerative to their industry. Their tardiness does not benefit their competitors, once these latter are employed up to capacity. Indeed, if the countries that hang back are an important part of the world’s economic system, the result must be to leave the disparity of price levels partly uncorrected, with undesirable consequences to everybody. . . .

The picture of an endless competition in currency depreciation is completely misleading. The race of depreciation is towards a definite goal; it is a competitive return to equilibrium. The situation is like that of a fishing fleet threatened with a storm; no harm is done if their return to a harbor of refuge is “competitive.” Let them race; the sooner they get there the better. (pp. 154-57)

Here’s Frances’s take on Hawtrey and me:

The highlight “in terms of gold” is mine, because it is the key to why Glasner is wrong. Hawtrey was right in his time, but his thinking does not apply now. We do not value today’s currencies in terms of gold. We value them in terms of each other. And in such a system, competitive devaluation is by definition beggar-my-neighbour.

Let me explain. Hawtrey defines currency values in relation to gold, and advertises the benefit of devaluing in relation to gold. The fact that gold is the standard means there is no direct relationship between my currency and yours. I may devalue my currency relative to gold, but you do not have to: my currency will be worth less compared to yours, but if the medium of account is gold, this does not matter since yours will still be worth the same amount in terms of gold. Assuming that the world price of gold remains stable, devaluation therefore principally affects the DOMESTIC price level.  As Hawtrey says, there may additionally be some external competitive advantage, but this is not the principal effect and it does not really matter if other countries also devalue. It is adjusting the relationship of domestic wages and prices in terms of gold that matters, since this eventually forces down the price of finished goods and therefore supports domestic demand.

Conversely, in a floating fiat currency system such as we have now, if I devalue my currency relative to yours, your currency rises relative to mine. There may be a domestic inflationary effect due to import price rises, but we do not value domestic wages or the prices of finished goods in terms of other currencies, so there can be no relative adjustment of wages to prices such as Hawtrey envisages. Devaluing the currency DOES NOT support domestic demand in a floating fiat currency system. It only rebalances the external position by making imports relatively more expensive and exports relatively cheaper.

This difference is crucial. In a gold standard system, devaluing the currency is a monetary adjustment to support domestic demand. In a floating fiat currency system, itis an external adjustment to improve competitiveness relative to other countries.

Actually, Frances did not quote the entire passage from Hawtrey that I reproduced in my post, and Frances would have done well to quote from, and to think carefully about, what Hawtrey said in the paragraphs preceding the ones she quoted. Here they are:

When Great Britain left the gold standard, deflationary measure were everywhere resorted to. Not only did the Bank of England raise its rate, but the tremendous withdrawals of gold from the United States involved an increase of rediscounts and a rise of rates there, and the gold that reached Europe was immobilized or hoarded. . . .

The consequence was that the fall in the price level continued. The British price level rose in the first few weeks after the suspension of the gold standard, but then accompanied the gold price level in its downward trend. This fall of prices calls for no other explanation than the deflationary measures which had been imposed. Indeed what does demand explanation is the moderation of the fall, which was on the whole not so steep after September 1931 as before.

Yet when the commercial and financial world saw that gold prices were falling rather than sterling prices rising, they evolved the purely empirical conclusion that a depreciation of the pound had no effect in raising the price level, but that it caused the price level in terms of gold and of those currencies in relation to which the pound depreciated to fall.

For any such conclusion there was no foundation. Whenever the gold price level tended to fall, the tendency would make itself felt in a fall in the pound concurrently with the fall in commodities. But it would be quite unwarrantable to infer that the fall in the pound was the cause of the fall in commodities.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that the depreciation of any currency, by reducing the cost of manufacture in the country concerned in terms of gold, tends to lower the gold prices of manufactured goods. . . .

But that is quite a different thing from lowering the price level. For the fall in manufacturing costs results in a greater demand for manufactured goods, and therefore the derivative demand for primary products is increased. While the prices of finished goods fall, the prices of primary products rise. Whether the price level as a whole would rise or fall it is not possible to say a priori, but the tendency is toward correcting the disparity between the price levels of finished products and primary products. That is a step towards equilibrium. And there is on the whole an increase of productive activity. The competition of the country which depreciates its currency will result in some reduction of output from the manufacturing industry of other countries. But this reduction will be less than the increase in the country’s output, for if there were no net increase in the world’s output there would be no fall of prices.

So Hawtrey was refuting precisely the argument raised  by Frances. Because the value of gold was not stable after Britain left the gold standard and depreciated its currency, the deflationary effect in other countries was mistakenly attributed to the British depreciation. But Hawtrey points out that this reasoning was backwards. The fall in prices in the rest of the world was caused by deflationary measures that were increasing the demand for gold and causing prices in terms of gold to continue to fall, as they had been since 1929. It was the fall in prices in terms of gold that was causing the pound to depreciate, not the other way around

Frances identifies an important difference between an international system of fiat currencies in which currency values are determined in relationship to each other in foreign exchange markets and a gold standard in which currency values are determined relative to gold. However, she seems to be suggesting that currency values in a fiat money system affect only the prices of imports and exports. But that can’t be so, because if the prices of imports and exports are affected, then the prices of the goods that compete with imports and exports must also be affected. And if the prices of tradable goods are affected, then the prices of non-tradables will also — though probably with a lag — eventually be affected as well. Of course, insofar as relative prices before the change in currency values were not in equilibrium, one can’t predict that all prices will adjust proportionately after the change.

To make the point in more abstract terms, the principle of purchasing power parity (PPP) operates under both a gold standard and a fiat money standard, and one can’t just assume that the gold standard has some special property that allows PPP to hold, while PPP is somehow disabled under a fiat currency system. Absent an explanation of why PPP doesn’t hold in a floating fiat currency system, the assertion that devaluing a currency (i.e., driving down the exchange value of one currency relative to other currencies) “is an external adjustment to improve competitiveness relative to other countries” is baseless.

I would also add a semantic point about this part of Frances’s argument:

We do not value today’s currencies in terms of gold. We value them in terms of each other. And in such a system, competitive devaluation is by definition beggar-my-neighbour.

Unfortunately, Frances falls into the common trap of believing that a definition actually tell us something about the real word, when in fact a definition tell us no more than what meaning is supposed to be attached to a word. The real world is invariant with respect to our definitions; our definitions convey no information about reality. So for Frances to say – apparently with the feeling that she is thereby proving her point – that competitive devaluation is by definition beggar-my-neighbour is completely uninformative about happens in the world; she is merely informing us about how she chooses to define the words she is using.

Frances goes on to refer to this graph taken from Gavyn Davies in the Financial Times, concerning a speech made by Stanley Fischer about research done by Fed staff economists showing that the 20% appreciation in the dollar over the past 18 months has reduced the rate of US inflation by as much as 1% and is projected to cause US GDP in three years to be about 3% lower than it would have been without dollar appreciation.Gavyn_Davies_Chart

Frances focuses on these two comments by Gavyn. First:

Importantly, the impact of the higher exchange rate does not reverse itself, at least in the time horizon of this simulation – it is a permanent hit to the level of GDP, assuming that monetary policy is not eased in the meantime.

And then:

According to the model, the annual growth rate should have dropped by about 0.5-1.0 per cent by now, and this effect should increase somewhat further by the end of this year.

Then, Frances continues:

But of course this assumes that the US does not ease monetary policy further. Suppose that it does?

The hit to net exports shown on the above graph is caused by imports becoming relatively cheaper and exports relatively more expensive as other countries devalue. If the US eased monetary policy in order to devalue the dollar support nominal GDP, the relative prices of imports and exports would rebalance – to the detriment of those countries attempting to export to the US.

What Frances overlooks is that by easing monetary policy to support nominal GDP, the US, aside from moderating or reversing the increase in its real exchange rate, would have raised total US aggregate demand, causing US income and employment to increase as well. Increased US income and employment would have increased US demand for imports (and for the products of American exporters), thereby reducing US net exports and increasing aggregate demand in the rest of the world. That was Hawtrey’s argument why competitive devaluation causes an increase in total world demand. Francis continues with a description of the predicament of the countries affected by US currency devaluation:

They have three choices: they respond with further devaluation of their own currencies to support exports, they impose import tariffs to support their own balance of trade, or they accept the deflationary shock themselves. The first is the feared “competitive devaluation” – exporting deflation to other countries through manipulation of the currency; the second, if widely practised, results in a general contraction of global trade, to everyone’s detriment; and you would think that no government would willingly accept the third.

But, as Hawtrey showed, competitive devaluation is not a problem. Depreciating your currency cushions the fall in nominal income and aggregate demand. If aggregate demand is kept stable, then the increased output, income, and employment associated with a falling exchange rate will spill over into a demand for the exports of other countries and an increase in the home demand for exportable home products. So it’s a win-win situation.

However, the Fed has permitted passive monetary tightening over the last eighteen months, and in December 2015 embarked on active monetary tightening in the form of interest rate rises. Davies questions the rationale for this, given the extraordinary rise in the dollar REER and the growing evidence that the US economy is weakening. I share his concern.

And I share his concern, too. So what are we even arguing about? Equally troubling is how passive tightening has reduced US demand for imports and for US exportable products, so passive tightening has negative indirect effects on aggregate demand in the rest of the world.

Although currency depreciation generally tends to increase the home demand for imports and for exportables, there are in fact conditions when the general rule that competitive devaluation is expansionary for all countries may be violated. In a number of previous posts (e.g., this, this, this, this and this) about currency manipulation, I have explained that when currency depreciation is undertaken along with a contractionary monetary policy, the terms-of-trade effect predominates without any countervailing effect on aggregate demand. If a country depreciates its exchange rate by intervening in foreign-exchange markets, buying foreign currencies with its own currency, thereby raising the value of foreign currencies relative to its own currency, it is also increasing the quantity of the domestic currency in the hands of the public. Increasing the quantity of domestic currency tends to raise domestic prices, thereby reversing, though probably with a lag, the effect on the currency’s real exchange rate. To prevent the real-exchange rate from returning to its previous level, the monetary authority must sterilize the issue of domestic currency with which it purchased foreign currencies. This can be done by open-market sales of assets by the cental bank, or by imposing increased reserve requirements on banks, thereby forcing banks to hold the new currency that had been created to depreciate the home currency.

This sort of currency manipulation, or exchange-rate protection, as Max Corden referred to it in his classic paper (reprinted here), is very different from conventional currency depreciation brought about by monetary expansion. The combination of currency depreciation and tight money creates an ongoing shortage of cash, so that the desired additional cash balances can be obtained only by way of reduced expenditures and a consequent export surplus. Since World War II, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, South Korea, and China are among the countries that have used currency undervaluation and tight money as a mechanism for exchange-rate protectionism in promoting industrialization. But exchange rate protection is possible not only under a fiat currency system. Currency manipulation was also possible under the gold standard, as happened when the France restored the gold standard in 1928, and pegged the franc to the dollar at a lower exchange rate than the franc had reached prior to the restoration of convertibility. That depreciation was accompanied by increased reserve requirements on French banknotes, providing the Bank of France with a continuing inflow of foreign exchange reserves with which it was able to pursue its insane policy of accumulating gold, thereby precipitating, with a major assist from the high-interest rate policy of the Fed, the deflation that turned into the Great Depression.

Economic Prejudice and High-Minded Sloganeering

Published August 31, 2015 currency manipulation , exchange rate protection , Max Corden , Paul Krugman , Scott Sumner 13 Comments
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In a post yesterday commenting on Paul Krugman’s takedown of a silly and ignorant piece of writing about monetary policy by William Cohan, Scott Sumner expressed his annoyance at the level of ignorance displayed people writing for supposedly elite publications like the New York Times which published Cohan’s rant about how it’s time for the Fed to show some spine and stop manipulating interest rates. Scott, ever vigilant, noticed that another elite publication the Financial Times published an equally silly rant by Avinah Persaud exhorting the Fed to show steel and raise rates.

Scott focused on one particular example of silliness about the importance of raising interest rates ASAP notwithstanding the fact that the Fed has failed to meet its 2% inflation target for something like 39 consecutive months:

Yet monetary policy cannot confine itself to reacting to the latest inflation data if it is to promote the wider goals of financial stability and sustainable economic growth. An over-reliance on extremely accommodative monetary policy may be one of the reasons why the world has not escaped from the clutches of a financial crisis that began more than eight years ago.

Scott deftly skewers Persaud with the following comment:

I suppose that’s why the eurozone economy took off after 2011, while the US failed to grow.  The ECB avoided our foolish QE policies, and “showed steel” by raising interest rates twice in the spring of 2011.  If only we had done the same.

But Scott allowed the following bit of nonsense on Persaud’s part to escape unscathed (I don’t mean to be critical of Scott, there’s only so much nonsense that any single person be expected to hold up to public derision):

The slowdown in the Chinese economy has its roots in decisions made far from Beijing. In the past five years, central banks in all the big advanced economies have embarked on huge quantitative easing programmes, buying financial assets with newly created cash. Because of the effect they have on exchange rates, these policies have a “beggar-thy-neighbour” quality. Growth has been shuffled from place to place — first the US, then Europe and Japan — with one country’s gains coming at the expense of another. This zero-sum game cannot launch a lasting global recovery. China is the latest loser. Last week’s renminbi devaluation brought into focus that since 2010, China’s export-driven economy has laboured under a 25 per cent appreciation of its real effective exchange rate.

The effect of quantitative easing on exchange rates is not the result of foreign-exchange-market intervention; it is the result of increasing the total quantity of base money. Expanding the monetary base reduces the value of the domestic currency unit relative to foreign currencies by raising prices in terms of the domestic currency relative to prices in terms of foreign currencies. There is no beggar-thy-neighbor effect from monetary expansion of this sort. And even if exchange-rate depreciation were achieved by direct intervention in the foreign-exchange markets, the beggar-thy-neighbor effect would be transitory as prices in terms of domestic and foreign currencies would adjust to reflect the altered exchange rate. As I have explained in a number of previous posts on currency manipulation (e.g., here, here, and here) relying on Max Corden’s contributions of 30 years ago on the concept of exchange-rate protection, a “beggar-thy-neighbor” effect is achieved only if there is simultaneous intervention in foreign-exchange markets to reduce the exchange rate of the domestic currency combined with offsetting open-market sales to contract – not expand – the monetary base (or, alternatively, increased reserve requirements to increase the domestic demand to hold the monetary base). So the allegation that quantitative easing has any substantial “beggar-thy-nation” effect is totally without foundation in economic theory. It is just the ignorant repetition of absurd economic prejudices dressed up in high-minded sloganeering about “zero-sum games” and “beggar-thy-neighbor” effects.

And while the real exchange rate of the Chinese yuan may have increased by 25% since 2010, the real exchange rate of the dollar over the same period in which the US was allegedly pursuing a beggar thy nation policy increased by about 12%. The appreciation of the dollar reflects the relative increase in the strength of the US economy over the past 5 years, precisely the opposite of a beggar-thy-neighbor strategy.

And at an intuitive level, it is just absurd to think that China would have been better off if the US, out of a tender solicitude for the welfare of Chinese workers, had foregone monetary expansion, and allowed its domestic economy to stagnate totally. To whom would the Chinese have exported in that case?

 

Currency Wars: The Next Generation

Published October 22, 2014 currency manipulation , currency war , exchange rate protection , Hawtrey 18 Comments
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I saw an interesting news story on the Bloomberg website today. The title sums it up pretty well. “Currency Wars Evolve With Goal of Avoiding Deflation.” Just as Lars Christensen predicted recently, nervous — and misguided — talk about currency wars is spreading fast. Here’s what it says on Bloomberg:

Currency wars are back, though this time the goal is to steal inflation, not growth.

Brazil Finance Minister Guido Mantega popularized the term “currency war” in 2010 to describe policies employed at the time by major central banks to boost the competitiveness of their economies through weaker currencies. Now, many see lower exchange rates as a way to avoid crippling deflation.

Now, as I have pointed out many times (e.g., here, here, and most recently here), “currency war” in the sense used by Mantega, also known as “currency manipulation” or “exchange-rate protection” involves the simultaneous application of exchange-rate intervention by the monetary authority to reduce the nominal exchange rate together with a tight monetary policy aimed at creating a chronic domestic excess demand for money, thereby forcing domestic households and businesses to restrict expenditure to build up their holdings of cash to desired levels, resulting in a chronic balance of payments surplus and the steady accumulation of foreign-exchange reserves by the central bank. So the idea that quantitative easing had anything to do with “currency war” in this sense was a nonsensical notion based on a complete failure to understand the difference between a nominal and a real exchange rate.

“This beggar-thy-neighbor policy is not about rebalancing, not about growth,” David Bloom, the global head of currency strategy at London-based HSBC Holdings Plc, which does business in 74 countries and territories, said in an Oct. 17 interview. “This is about deflation, exporting your deflationary problems to someone else.”

Bloom puts it in these terms because, when one jurisdiction weakens its exchange rate, another’s gets stronger, making imported goods cheaper. Deflation is a both a consequence of, and contributor to, the global economic slowdown that’s pushing the euro region closer to recession and reducing demand for exports from countries such as China and New Zealand.

Well, by definition of an exchange rate (a reciprocal relationship) between two currencies, if one currency appreciates the other depreciates correspondingly. If the euro depreciates relative to the dollar, prices of the same goods will rise measured in euros and fall measured in dollars. The question is what has been causing the euro to depreciate relative to the dollar. The notion of a currency war is meaningless if the change in exchange rates is not at least in part being driven by a deliberate policy choice. So what kind of policy choices are we talking about?

Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said last month he’d welcome a lower exchange rate to help meet his inflation target and may extend the nation’s unprecedented stimulus program to achieve that. Like his Japanese counterpart, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has acknowledged the need for a weaker euro to avoid deflation and make exports more competitive, though he’s denied targeting the exchange rate specifically.

After the Argentine peso, which is plunging following a debt default and devaluation, the yen will be the biggest loser among major currencies by the end of 2015, according to median strategist forecasts compiled by Bloomberg as of yesterday. A 6 percent decline is predicted, which would build on a 5.5 percent slide since June.

The euro is also expected to be among the 10 biggest losers, with strategists seeing a 4.8 percent drop. The yen traded at 107.21 per dollar 10:18 a.m. in New York, while the euro bought $1.2658.

Notice that there is no mention of the monetary policy that goes along with the exchange-rate target. Since the goal of the monetary policy is to produce inflation, one would imagine that the mechanism is monetary expansion. If the Japanese and the Europeans want their currencies to depreciate against the dollar, they can intervene in foreign-exchange markets and buy up dollars with newly printed euros or yen. That would tend to cause euros and yen to depreciate against the dollar, but would also tend to raise prices of goods in terms of euros and yen. How does that export deflation to the US?

At 0.3 percent in September, annual inflation in the 18-nation bloc remains a fraction of the ECB’s target of just under 2 percent. Gross-domestic-product growth flat-lined in the second quarter, while Germany, Europe‘s biggest economy, reduced its 2014 expansion forecast this month to 1.2 percent from 1.8 percent.

Disinflationary pressures in the euro area are starting to spread to its neighbors and biggest trading partners. The currencies of Switzerland, Hungary (HUCPIYY), Denmark, the Czech Republic and Sweden are forecast to fall from 3.8 percent to more than 6 percent by the end of next year, estimates compiled by Bloomberg show, partly due to policy makers’ actions to stoke prices.

“Deflation is spilling over to central and eastern Europe,” Simon Quijano-Evans, the London-based head of emerging-markets research at Commerzbank AG, said yesterday by phone. “Weaker exchange rates will help” them tackle the issue, he said.

Hungary and Switzerland entered deflation in the past two months, while Swedish central-bank Deputy Governor Per Jansson last week blamed his country’s falling prices partly on rate cuts the ECB used to boost its own inflation. A policy response may be necessary, he warned.

If the Swedish central bank thinks that it is experiencing deflation, it has tools with which to prevent deflation from occurring. It is bizarre to suggest that a rate cut by ECB could be causing deflation in Sweden.

While not strictly speaking stimulus measures, the Swiss, Danish and Czech currency pegs — whether official or unofficial — have a similar effect by limiting gains versus the euro.

The Swedes could very easily adopt a similar currency peg to avoid any appreciation of the Swedish krona against the euro.

Measures like these are necessary because, even after a broad-based dollar rally, eight of the Group of 10 developed-nation currencies remain overvalued versus the dollar, according to a purchasing-power parity measure from the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development.

If these currencies are overvalued relative to the dollar, according to a PPP measure, they are under deflationary pressure even at current exchange rates. That means that exchange rate depreciation via monetary expansion is essential to counteracting deflationary pressure.

The notion that exchange-rate depreciation to avoid deflation is a beggar-thy-neighbor policy or a warlike act could not be more wrong. If exchange-rate depreciation by one country causes retaliation by other countries that try to depreciate their currencies even more, that would be a virtuous cycle, not a vicious one.

In his book Trade Depression and the Way Out, Hawtrey summed it up beautifully over 80 years ago, as I observed in this post.

In consequence of the competitive advantage gained by a country’s manufacturers from a depreciation of its currency, any such depreciation is only too likely to meet with recriminations and even retaliation from its competitors. . . . Fears are even expressed that if one country starts depreciation, and others follow suit, there may result “a competitive depreciation” to which no end can be seen.

This competitive depreciation is an entirely imaginary danger. The benefit that a country derives from the depreciation of its currency is in the rise of its price level relative to its wage level, and does not depend on its competitive advantage. If other countries depreciate their currencies, its competitive advantage is destroyed, but the advantage of the price level remains both to it and to them. They in turn may carry the depreciation further, and gain a competitive advantage. But this race in depreciation reaches a natural limit when the fall in wages and in the prices of manufactured goods in terms of gold has gone so far in all the countries concerned as to regain the normal relation with the prices of primary products. When that occurs, the depression is over, and industry is everywhere remunerative and fully employed. Any countries that lag behind in the race will suffer from unemployment in their manufacturing industry. But the remedy lies in their own hands; all they have to do is to depreciate their currencies to the extent necessary to make the price level remunerative to their industry. Their tardiness does not benefit their competitors, once these latter are employed up to capacity. Indeed, if the countries that hang back are an important part of the world’s economic system, the result must be to leave the disparity of price levels partly uncorrected, with undesirable consequences to everybody. . . .

The picture of an endless competition in currency depreciation is completely misleading. The race of depreciation is towards a definite goal; it is a competitive return to equilibrium. The situation is like that of a fishing fleet threatened with a storm; no harm is done if their return to a harbor of refuge is “competitive.” Let them race; the sooner they get there the better.

The only small quibble that I have with Hawtrey’s discussion is his assertion that a fall in the real wage is necessary to restore equilibrium. A temporary fall in real wages may be part of the transition to equilibrium, but that doesn’t mean that the real wage at the end of the transition must be less than it was at the start of the process.

About Me

David Glasner
Washington, DC

I am an economist in the Washington DC area. My research and writing has been mostly on monetary economics and policy and the history of economics. In my book Free Banking and Monetary Reform, I argued for a non-Monetarist non-Keynesian approach to monetary policy, based on a theory of a competitive supply of money. Over the years, I have become increasingly impressed by the similarities between my approach and that of R. G. Hawtrey and hope to bring Hawtrey’s unduly neglected contributions to the attention of a wider audience.

My new book Studies in the History of Monetary Theory: Controversies and Clarifications has been published by Palgrave Macmillan

Follow me on Twitter @david_glasner

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