Archive for the 'exchange rate protection' Category

The Demise of Bretton Woods Fifty Years On

Published August 15, 2021 Bretton Woods , Charles de Gaulle , exchange rate protection , gold standard , Great Depression , Gustav Cassel , Max Corden , Milton Friedman , R. G. Hawtrey 8 Comments
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Today, Sunday, August 15, 2021, marks the 50th anniversary of the closing of the gold window at the US Treasury, at which a small set of privileged entities were at least legally entitled to demand redemption of dollar claims issued by the US government at the official gold price of $35 an ounce. (In 1971, as in 2021, August 15 fell on a Sunday.) When I started blogging in July 2011, I wrote one of my early posts about the 40th anniversary of that inauspicious event. My attention in that post was directed more at the horrific consequences of Nixon’s decision to combine a freeze on wages and price with the closing of the gold window, which was clearly far more damaging than the largely symbolic effect of closing the gold window. I am also re-upping my original post with some further comments, but in this post, my attention is directed solely on the closing of the gold window.

The advent of cryptocurrencies and the continuing agitprop aiming to restore the gold standard apparently suggest to some people that the intrinsically trivial decision to do away with the final vestige of the last remnant of the short-lived international gold standard is somehow laden with cosmic significance. See for example the new book by Jeffrey Garten (Three Days at Camp David) marking the 50th anniversary.

About 10 years before the gold window was closed, Milton Friedman gave a lecture at the Mont Pelerin Society which he called “Real and Pseudo-Gold Standards“, which I previously wrote about here. Many if not most of the older members of the Mont Pelerin Society, notably (L. v. Mises and Jacques Rueff) were die-hard supporters of the gold standard who regarded the Bretton Woods system as a deplorable counterfeit imitation of the real gold standard and longed for restoration of that old-time standard. In his lecture, Friedman bowed in their direction by faintly praising what he called a real gold standard, which he described as a state of affairs in which the quantity of money could be increased only by minting gold or by exchanging gold for banknotes representing an equivalent value of gold. Friedman argued that although a real gold standard was an admirable monetary system, the Bretton Woods system was nothing of the sort, calling it a pseudo-gold standard. Given that the then existing Bretton Woods system was not a real gold standard, but merely a system of artificially controlling the price of a particular commodity, Friedman argued that the next-best alternative would be to impose a quantitative limit on the increase in the quantity of fiat money, by enacting a law that would prohibit the quantity of money from growing by more than some prescribed amount or by some percentage (k-percent per year) of the existing stock percent in any given time period.

While failing to win over the die-hard supporters of the gold standard, Friedman’s gambit was remarkably successful, and for many years, it actually was the rule of choice among most like-minded libertarians and self-styled classical liberals and small-government conservatives. Eventually, the underlying theoretical and practical defects in Friedman’s k-percent rule became sufficiently obvious to cause even Friedman, however reluctantly, to abandon his single-minded quest for a supposedly automatic non-discretionary quantitative monetary rule.

Nevertheless, Friedman ultimately did succeed in undermining support among most right-wing conservative, libertarian and many centrist or left-leaning economists and decision makers for the Bretton Woods system of fixed, but adjustable, exchange rates anchored by a fixed dollar price of gold. And a major reason for his success was his argument that it was only by shifting to flexible exchange rates and abandoning a fixed gold price that the exchange controls and restrictions on capital movements that were in place for a quarter of a century after World Was II could be lifted, a rationale congenial and persuasive to many who might have otherwise been unwilling to experiment with a system of flexible exchange rates among fiat currencies that had never previously been implemented.

Indeed, the neoliberal economic and financial globalization that followed the closing of the gold window and freeing of exchange rates after the demise of the Bretton Woods system, whether one applauds or reviles it, can largely be attributed to Friedman’s influence both as an economic theorist and as a propagandist. As much as Friedman deplored the imposition of wage and price controls on August 15, 1971, he had reason to feel vindicated by the closing of the gold window, the freeing of exchange rates, and, eventually, the lifting of all capital controls and the legalization of gold ownership by private individuals, all of which followed from the Camp David meeting.

But, the objective economic situation confronted by those at Camp David was such that the Bretton Woods System could not be salvaged. As I wrote in my 2011 post, the Bretton Woods system built on the foundation of a fixed gold price of $35 an ounce was not a true gold standard because a free market in gold did not exist and could not be maintained at the official price. Trade in gold was sharply restricted, and only privileged central banks and governments were legally entitled to buy or sell gold at the official price. Even the formal right of the privileged foreign governments and central banks was subject to the informal, but unwelcome and potentially dangerous, disapproval of the United States.

The gold standard is predicated on the idea that gold has an ascertainable value, so that if money is made exchangeable for gold at a fixed rate, money and gold will have an identical value owing to arbitrage transactions. Such arbitrage transactions can occur only if, and so long as, no barriers prevent effective arbitrage. The unquestioned convertibility of a unit of currency into gold ensured that arbitrage would constrain the value of money to equal the value of gold. But under Bretton Woods the opportunities for arbitrage were so drastically limited that the value of the dollar was never clearly equal to the value of gold, which was governed by, pardon the expression, fiat rather than by free-market transactions.

The lack of a tight link between the value of gold and the value of the dollar was not a serious problem as long as the value of the dollar was kept essentially stable and there was a functioning (albeit not freely) gold market. After its closure during World War II, the gold market did not function at all until 1954, so the wartime and postwar inflation and the brief Korean War inflation did not undermine the official gold price of $35 an ounce that had been set in 1934 and was maintained under Bretton Woods. Even after a functioning, but not entirely free, gold market was reopened in 1954, the official price was easily sustained until the late 1960s thanks to central-bank cooperation, whose formalization through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was one of the positive achievements of Bretton Woods. The London gold price was hardly a free-market price, because of central bank intervention and restrictions imposed on access to the market, but the gold holdings of the central banks were so large that it had always been in their power to control the market price if they were sufficiently determined to do so. But over the course of the 1960s, their cohesion gradually came undone. Why was that?

The first point to note is that the gold standard evolved over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries first as a British institution, and much later as an international institution, largely by accident from a system of simultaneous gold and silver coinages that were closely but imperfectly linked by a relative price of between 15 to 16 ounces of silver per ounce of gold. Depending on the precise legal price ratio of silver coins to gold coins in any particular country, the legally overvalued undervalued metal would flow out of that country and the undervalued overvalued metal would flow into that country.

When Britain undervalued gold at the turn of the 18th century, gold flowed into Britain, leading to the birth of the British of gold standard. In most other countries, silver and gold coins were circulating simultaneously at a ratio of 15.5 ounces of silver per ounce of gold. It was only when the US, after the Civil War, formally adopted a gold standard and the newly formed German Reich also shifted from a bimetallic to a gold standard that the increased demand for gold caused gold to appreciate relative to silver. To avoid the resulting inflation, countries with bimetallic systems based on a 15.5 to 1 silver/gold suspended the free coinage of silver and shifted to the gold standard further raising the silver/gold price ratio. Thus, the gold standard became an international not just a British system only in the 1870s, and it happened not by design or international consensus but by a series of piecemeal decisions by individual countries.

The important takeaway from this short digression into monetary history is that the relative currency values of the gold standard currencies were largely inherited from the historical definitions of the currency units of each country, not by deliberate policy decisions about what currency value to adopt in establishing the gold standard in any particular country. But when the gold standard collapsed in August 1914 at the start of World War I, the gold standard had to be recreated more or less from scratch after the War. The US, holding 40% of the world’s monetary gold reserves was in a position to determine the value of gold, so it could easily restore convertibility at the prewar gold price of $20.67 an ounce. For other countries, the choice of the value at which to restore gold convertibility was really a decision about the dollar exchange rate at which to peg their currencies.

Before the war, the dollar-pound exchange rate was $4.86 per pound. The postwar dollar-pound exchange rate was just barely close enough to the prewar rate to make restoring the convertibility of the pound at the prewar rate with the dollar seem doable. Many including Keynes argued that Britain would be better with an exchange rate in the neighborhood of $4.40 or less, but Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was persuaded to restore convertibility at the prewar parity. That decision may or may not have been a good one, but I believe that its significance for the world economy at the time and subsequently has been overstated. After convertibility was restored at the prewar parity, chronically high postwar British unemployment increased only slightly in 1925-26 before declining modestly until with the onset of the Great Deflation and Great Depression in late 1929. The British economy would have gotten a boost if the prewar dollar-pound parity had not been restored (or if the Fed had accommodated the prewar parity by domestic monetary expansion), but the drag on the British economy after 1925 was a negligible factor compared to the other factors, primarily gold accumulation by the US and France, that triggered the Great Deflation in late 1929.

The cause of that deflation was largely centered in France (with a major assist from the Federal Reserve). Before the war the French franc was worth about 20 cents, but disastrous French postwar economic policies caused the franc to fall to just 2 cents in 1926 when Raymond Poincaré was called upon to lead a national-unity government to stabilize the situation. His success was remarkable, the franc rising to over 4 cents within a few months. However, despite earlier solemn pledges to restore the franc to its prewar value of 20 cents, he was persuaded to stabilize the franc at just 3.92 cents when convertibility into gold was reestablished in June 1928, undervaluing the franc against both the dollar and the pound.

Not only was the franc undervalued, but the Bank of France, which, under previous governments had been persuaded or compelled to supply francs to finance deficit spending, was prohibited by the new Monetary Law that restored convertibility at the fixed rate of 3.92 cents from increasing the quantity of francs except in exchange for gold or foreign-exchange convertible into gold. While protecting the independence of the Bank of France from government fiscal demands, the law also prevented the French money stock from increasing to accommodate increases in the French demand for money except by way of a current account surplus, or a capital inflow.

Meanwhile, the Bank of France began converting foreign-exchange reserves into gold. The resulting increase in French gold holdings led to gold appreciation. Under the gold standard, gold appreciation is manifested in price deflation affecting all gold-standard countries. That deflation was the direct and primary cause of the Great Depression, which led, over a period of five brutal years, to the failure and demise of the newly restored international gold standard.

These painful lessons were not widely or properly understood at the time, or for a long time afterward, but the clear takeaway from that experience was that trying to restore the gold standard again would be a dangerous undertaking. Another lesson that was intuited, if not fully understood, is that if a country pegs its exchange rate to gold or to another currency, it is safer to err on the side of undervaluation than overvaluation. So, when the task of recreating an international monetary system was undertaken at Bretton Woods in July 1944, the architects of the system tried to adapt it to the formal trappings of the gold standard while eliminating the deflationary biases and incentives that had doomed the interwar gold standard. To prevent increasing demand for gold from causing deflation, the obligation to convert cash into gold was limited to the United States and access to the US gold window was restricted to other central banks via the newly formed international monetary fund. Each country could, in consultation with the IMF, determine its exchange rate with the dollar.

Given the earlier experience, countries had an incentive to set exchange rates that undervalued their currencies relative to the dollar. Thus, for most of the 1950s and early 1960s, the US had to contend with a currency that was overvalued relative to the currencies of its principal trading partners, Germany and Italy (the two fastest growing economies in Europe) and Japan (later joined by South Korea and Taiwan) in Asia. In one sense, the overvaluation was beneficial to the US, because access to low-cost and increasingly high-quality imports was a form of repayment to the US of its foreign-aid assistance, and its ongoing defense protection against the threat of Communist expansionism , but the benefit came with the competitive disadvantage to US tradable-goods industries.

When West Germany took control of its economic policy from the US military in 1948, most price-and-wage controls were lifted and the new deutschmark was devalued by a third relative to the official value of the old reichsmark. A further devaluation of almost 25% followed a year later. Great Britain in 1949, perhaps influenced by the success of the German devaluation, devalued the pound by 30% from old parity of $4.03 to $2.80 in 1949. But unlike Germany, Britain, under the postwar Labour government, attempting to avoid postwar inflation, maintained wartime exchange controls and price controls. The underlying assumption at the time was that the Britain’s balance-of-payments deficit reflected an overvalued currency, so that devaluation would avoid repeating the mistake made two decades earlier when the dollar-pound parity had overvalued the pound.

That assumption, as Ralph Hawtrey had argued in lonely opposition to the devaluation, was misguided; the idea that the current account depends only, or even primarily, on the exchange rate abstracts from the monetary forces that affect the balance of payments and the current account. Worse, because British monetary policy was committed to the goal of maximizing short-term employment, the resulting excess supply of cash inevitably increased domestic spending, thereby attracting imports and diverting domestically produced products from export markets and preventing the devaluation from achieving the goal of improving the trade balance and promoting expansion of the tradable-goods sector.

Other countries, like Germany and Italy, combined currency undervaluation with monetary restraint, allowing only monetary expansion that was occasioned by current-account surpluses. This became the classic strategy, later called exchange-rate protection by Max Corden, of combining currency undervaluation with tight monetary policy. British attempts to use monetary policy to promote both (over)full employment subject to the balance-of-payments constraint imposed by an exchange rate pegged to the dollar proved unsustainable, while Germany, Italy, France (after De Gaulle came to power in 1958 and devalued the franc) found the combination of monetary restraint and currency undervaluation a successful economic strategy until the United States increased monetary expansion to counter chronic overvaluation of the dollar.

Because the dollar was the key currency of the world monetary system, and had committed itself to maintain the $35 an ounce price of gold, the US, unlike other countries whose currencies were pegged to the dollar, could not adjust the dollar exchange rate to reduce or alleviate the overvaluation of the dollar relative to the currencies of its trading partners. Mindful of its duties as supplier of the world’s reserve currency, US monetary authorities kept US inflation close to zero after the 1953 Korean War armistice.

However, that restrained monetary policy led to three recessions under the Eisenhower administration (1953-54, 1957-58, and 1960-61). The latter recessions led to disastrous Republican losses in the 1958 midterm elections and to Richard Nixon’s razor-thin loss in 1960 to John Kennedy, who had campaigned on a pledge to get the US economy moving again. The loss to Kennedy was a lesson that Nixon never forgot, and he was determined never to allow himself to lose another election merely because of scruples about US obligations as supplier of the world’s reserve currency.

Upon taking office, the Kennedy administration pressed for an easing of Fed policy to end the recession and to promote accelerated economic expansion. The result was a rapid recovery from the 1960-61 recession and the start of a nearly nine-year period of unbroken economic growth at perhaps the highest average growth rate in US history. While credit for the economic expansion is often given to the across-the-board tax cuts proposed by Kennedy in 1963 and enacted in 1964 under Lyndon Johnson, the expansion was already well under way by mid-1961, three years before the tax cuts became effective.

The international aim of monetary policy was to increase nominal domestic spending and to force US trading partners with undervalued currencies either to accept increased holdings of US liabilities or to revalue their exchange rates relative to the dollar to diminish their undervaluation relative to the dollar. Easier US monetary policy led to increasing complaints from Europeans, especially the Germans, that the US was exporting inflation and to charges that the US was taking advantage of the exorbitant privilege of its position as supplier of the world’s reserve currency.

The aggressive response of the Kennedy administration to undervaluation of most other currencies led to predictable pushback from France under de Gaulle who, like many other conservative and right-wing French politicians, was fixated on the gold standard and deeply resented Anglo-American monetary pre-eminence after World War I and American dominance after World War II. Like France under Poincaré, France under de Gaulle sought to increase its gold holdings as it accumulated dollar-denominated foreign exchange. But under Bretton Woods, French gold accumulation had little immediate economic effect other than to enhance the French and Gaullist pretensions to grandiosity.

Already in 1961 Robert Triffin predicted that the Bretton Woods system could not endure permanently because the growing world demand for liquidity could not be satisfied by the United States in a world with a relatively fixed gold stock and a stable or rising price level. The problem identified by Triffin was not unlike that raised by Gustav Cassel in the 1920s when he predicted that the world gold stock would likely not increase enough to prevent a worldwide deflation. This was a different problem from the one that actually caused the Great Depression, which was a substantial increase in gold demand associated with the restoration of the gold standard that triggered the deflationary collapse of late 1929. The long-term gold shortage feared by Cassel was a long-term problem distinct from the increase in gold demand caused by the restoration of the gold standard in the 1920s.

The problem Triffin identified was also a long-term consequence of the failure of the international gold stock to increase to provide the increased gold reserves that would be needed for the US to be able to credibly commit to maintaining the convertibility of the dollar into gold without relying on deflation to cause the needed increase in the real value of gold reserves.

Had it not been for the Vietnam War, Bretton Woods might have survived for several more years, but the rise of US inflation to over 4% in 1968-69, coupled with the 1969-70 recession in an unsuccessful attempt to reduce inflation, followed by a weak recovery in 1971, made it clear that the US would not undertake a deflationary policy to make the official $35 gold price credible. Although de Gaulle’s unexpected retirement in 1969 removed the fiercest opponent of US monetary domination, confidence that the US could maintain the official gold peg, when the London gold price was already 10% higher than the official price, caused other central banks to fear that they would be stuck with devalued dollar claims once the US raised the official gold price. Not only the French, but other central banks were already demanding redemption in gold of the dollar claims that they were holding.

An eleventh-hour policy reversal by the administration to save the official gold price was not in the cards, and everyone knew it. So all the handwringing about the abandonment of Bretton Woods on August 15, 1971 is either simple foolishness or gaslighting. The system was already broken, and it couldn’t be fixed at any price worth pondering for even half an instant. Nixon and his accomplices tried to sugarcoat their scrapping of the Bretton Woods System by pretending that they were announcing a plan that was the first step toward its reform and rejuvenation. But that pretense led to a so-called agreement with a new gold-price peg of $38 an ounce, which lasted hardly a year before it died not with a bang but a whimper.

What can we learn from this story? For me the real lesson is that the original international gold standard was, to borrow (via Hayek) a phrase from Adam Ferguson: “the [accidental] result of human action, not human design.” The gold standard, as it existed for those 40 years, was not an intuitively obvious or well understood mechanism working according to a clear blueprint; it was an improvised set of practices, partly legislated and partly customary, and partially nothing more than conventional, but not very profound, wisdom.

The original gold standard collapsed with the outbreak of World War I and the attempt to recreate it after World War I, based on imperfect understanding of how it had actually functioned, ended catastrophically with the Great Depression, a second collapse, and another, even more catastrophic, World War. The attempt to recreate a new monetary system –the Bretton Woods system — using a modified feature of the earlier gold standard as a kind of window dressing, was certainly not a real gold standard, and, perhaps, not even a pseudo-gold standard; those who profess to mourn its demise are either fooling themselves or trying to fool the rest of us.

We are now stuck with a fiat system that has evolved and been tinkered with over centuries. We have learned how to manage it, at least so far, to avoid catastrophe. With hard work and good luck, perhaps we will continue to learn how to manage it better than we have so far. But to seek to recreate a system that functioned fairly successfully for at most 40 years under conditions not even remotely likely ever again to be approximated, is hardly likely to lead to an outcome that will enhance human well-being. Even worse, if that system were recreated, the resulting outcome might be far worse than anything we have experienced in the last half century.

Ralph Hawtrey Wrote the Book that Arthur Burns Should Have Read — but Didn’t

Published April 15, 2019 exchange rate protection , Max Corden , R. G. Hawtrey 12 Comments
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In my previous post I wrote about the mistakes made by Arthur Burns after Nixon appointed him Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Here are the critical missteps of Burns’s unfortunate tenure.

1 Upon becoming chairman in January 1970, with inflation running at over 5% despite a modest tightening by his predecessor in 1969, Burns further tightened monetary policy, causing a downturn and a recession lasting the whole of 1970. The recession was politically damaging to Nixon, leading to sizable Republican losses in the November midterm elections, and causing Nixon to panic about losing his re-election bid in 1972. In his agitation, Nixon then began badgering Burns to loosen monetary policy.

2 Yielding to Nixon’s demands for an easing of monetary policy, Burns eased monetary policy sufficiently to allow a modest recovery to get under way in 1971. But the recovery was too tepid to suit Nixon. Fearing the inflationary implications of a further monetary loosening, Burns began publicly lobbying for the adoption of an incomes policy to limit the increase of wages set by collective bargaining between labor unions and major businesses.

3 Burns’s unwillingness to provide the powerful stimulus desired by Nixon until an incomes policy was in place to hold down inflation led Nixon to abandon his earlier opposition to wage-and-price controls. On August 15, 1971 Nixon imposed a 90-day freeze on all wages and prices to be followed by comprehensive wage-and-price controls. With controls in place, Burns felt secure in accelerating the rate of monetary expansion, leaving it to those controlling wages and prices to keep inflation within acceptable bounds.

4 With controls in place, monetary expansion at first fueled rapid growth of output, but as time passed, the increase in spending was increasingly reflected in inflation rather than output growth. By Q4 1973, inflation rose to 7%, a rate only marginally affected by the Arab oil embargo on oil shipments to the United States and a general reduction in oil output, which led to a quadrupling of oil prices by early 1974.

5 The sharp oil-price increase simultaneously caused inflation to rise sharply above the 7% rate it had reached at the end of 1973 even as it caused a deep downturn and recession in the first quarter of 1974. Rather than accommodate the increase in oil prices by tolerating a temporary increase in inflation, Burns sharply tightened monetary policy reducing the rate of monetary expansion so that the rate of growth of total spending dropped precipitously. Given the increase in oil prices, the drop in total spending caused a major contraction in output and employment, resulting in the deepest recession since 1937-38.

These mistakes all stemmed from a failure by Burns to understand the rationale of an incomes policy. Burns was not alone in that failure, which was actually widespread at the time. But the rationale for such a policy and the key to its implementation had already been spelled out cogently by Ralph Hawtrey in his 1967 diagnosis of the persistent failures of British monetary policy and macroeconomic performance in the post World War II period, failures that had also been deeply tied up in the misunderstanding of the rationale for – and the implementation of — an incomes policy. Unlike Burns, Hawtrey did not view an incomes policy as a substitute for, or an alternative to, monetary policy to reduce inflation. Rather, an incomes policy was precisely the use of monetary policy to achieve a rate of growth in total spending and income that could be compatible with full employment, provided the rate of growth of wages was consistent with full employment.

In Burns’s understanding, the role of an incomes policy was to prevent wage increases from driving up production costs so high that businesses could not operate profitably at maximum capacity without a further increase in inflation by the Federal Reserve. If the wage increases negotiated by the unions exceeded the level compatible with full employment at the targeted rate of inflation, businesses would reduce output and lay off workers. Faced with that choice, the Fed or any monetary authority would be caught in the dreaded straits of Scylla and Charybdis (aka between a rock and a hard place).

What Burns evidently didn’t understand, or chose to ignore, was that adopting an incomes policy to restrain wage increases did not allow the monetary authority to implement a monetary policy that would cause nominal GDP to rise at a rate faster than was consistent with full employment at the target rate of inflation. If, for example, the growth of the labor force and the expected increase in productivity was consistent with a 4% rate of real GDP growth over time and the monetary authority was aiming for an inflation rate no greater than 3%, the monetary authority could not allow nominal GDP to grow at a rate above 7%.

This conclusion is subject to the following qualification. During a transition from high unemployment to full employment, a faster rate of nominal GDP growth than the posited 7% rate could hasten the restoration of full employment. But temporarily speeding nominal GDP growth would also require that, as a state of full employment was approached, the growth of nominal GDP be tapered off and brought down to a sustainable rate.

But what if an incomes policy does keep the rate of increase in wages below the rate consistent with 3% inflation? Could the monetary authority then safely conduct a monetary policy that increased the rate of nominal GDP growth in order to accelerate real economic growth without breaching the 3% inflation target? Once again, the answer is that real GDP growth can be accelerated only as long as sufficient slack remains in an economy with less than full employment so that accelerating spending growth does not result in shortages of labor or intermediate products. Once shortages emerge, wages or prices of products in short supply must be raised to allocate resources efficiently and to prevent shortages from causing production breakdowns.

Burns might have pulled off a remarkable feat by ensuring Nixon’s re-election in 1972 with a massive monetary stimulus causing the fastest increase in nominal real GDP since the Korean War in Q4 of 1972, while wage-and-price controls ensured that the monetary stimulus would be channeled into increased output rather than accelerating inflation. But that strategy was viable only while sufficient slack remained to allow additional spending to call forth further increases in output rather than cause either price increases, or, if wages and prices are subject to binding controls, shortages of supply. Early in 1973, as inflation began to increase and real GDP growth began to diminish, the time to slow down monetary expansion had arrived. But Burns was insensible to the obvious change in conditions.

Here is where we need to focus the discussion directly on Hawtrey’s book Incomes and Money. By the time Hawtrey wrote this book – his last — at the age of 87, he had long been eclipsed not only in the public eye, but in the economics profession, by his slightly younger contemporary and fellow Cambridge graduate, J. M. Keynes. For a while in the 1920s, Hawtrey might have been the more influential of the two, but after The General Theory was published, Hawtrey was increasingly marginalized as new students no longer studied Hawtrey’s writing, while older economists, who still remembered Hawtrey and were familiar with his work, gradually left the scene. Moreover, as a civil servant for most of his career, Hawtrey never collected around himself a group disciples who, because they themselves had a personal stake in the ideas of their mentor, would carry on and propagate those ideas. By the end of World War II, Hawtrey was largely unknown to younger economists.

As a graduate student in the early 1970s, Hawtrey’s name came only occasionally to my attention, mostly in the context of his having been a notable pre-Keynesian monetary theorist whose ideas were of interest mainly to historians of thought. My most notable recollection relating to Hawtrey was that in a conversation with Hayek, whose specific context I no longer recall, Hayek mentioned Hawtrey to me as an economist whose work had been unduly neglected and whose importance was insufficiently recognized, even while acknowledging that he himself had written critically about what he regarded as Hawtrey’s overemphasis on changes in the value of money as the chief cause of business-cycle fluctuations.

It was probably because I remembered that recommendation that when I was in Manhattan years later and happened upon a brand new copy of Incomes and Money on sale in a Barnes and Noble bookstore, I picked it up and bought it. But buying it on the strength of Hayek’s recommendation didn’t lead me to actually read it. I actually can’t remember when I finally did read the book, but it was likely not until after I discovered that Hawtrey had anticipated the gold-appreciation theory of the Great Depression that I had first heard, as a graduate student, from Earl Thompson.

In Incomes and Money, Hawtrey focused not on the Great Depression, which he notably had discussed in earlier books like The Gold Standard and The Art of Central Banking, but on the experience of Great Britain after World War II. That experience was conditioned on the transition from the wartime controls under which Britain had operated in World War II to the partial peacetime decontrol under the Labour government that assumed power at the close of World War II. One feature of wartime controls was that, owing to the shortages and rationing caused by price controls, substantial unwanted holdings of cash were accumulating in the hands of individuals unable to use their cash to purchase desired goods and services.

The US dollar and the British pound were then the two primary currencies used in international trade, but as long as products were in short supply because of price controls, neither currency could serve as an effective medium of exchange for international transactions, which were largely conducted via managed exchange or barter between governments. After the war, the US moved quickly to decontrol prices, allowing prices to rise sufficiently to eliminate excess cash, thereby enabling the dollar to again function as an international medium of exchange and creating a ready demand to hold dollar balances outside the US. The Labour government being ideologically unwilling to scrap price controls, excess holdings of pounds within Britain could only be disposed of insofar as they could be exchanged for dollars with which products could be procured from abroad.

There was therefore intense British demand for dollars but little or no American demand for pounds, an imbalance reflected in a mounting balance-of-payments deficit. The balance-of-payments deficit was misunderstood and misinterpreted as an indication that British products were uncompetitive, British production costs (owing to excessive British wages) supposedly being too high to allow the British products to be competitive in international markets. If British production costs were excessive, then the appropriate remedy was either to cut British wages or to devalue the pound to reduce the real wages paid to British workers. But Hawtrey maintained that the balance-of-payments deficit was a purely monetary phenomenon — an excess supply of pounds and an excess demand for dollars — that could properly be remedied either by withdrawing excess pounds from the holdings of the British public or by decontrolling prices so that excess pounds could be used to buy desired goods and services at market-clearing prices.

Thus, almost two decades before the Monetary Approach to the Balance of Payments was developed by Harry Johnson, Robert Mundell and associates, Hawtrey had already in the 1940s anticipated its principal conclusion that a chronic balance-of-payments disequilibrium results from a monetary policy that creates either more or less cash than the public wishes to hold rather than a disequilibrium in its exchange rate. If so, the remedy for the disequilibrium is not a change in the exchange rate, but a change in monetary policy.

In his preface to Incomes and Money, Hawtrey set forth the main outlines of his argument.

This book is primarily a criticism of British monetary policy since 1945, along with an application of the criticism to questions of future policy.

The aims of policy were indicated to the Radcliffe Committee in 1957 in a paper on Monetary Policy and the Control of Economic Conditions: “The primary object of policy has been to combine a high and stable level of employment with a satisfactory state of the balance of payments”. When Sir Robert Hall was giving oral evidence on behalf of the Treasury, Lord Radcliffe asked, ”Where does sound money as an objective stand?” The reply was that “there may well be a conflict between the objective of high employment and the objective of sound money”, a dilemma which Treasury did not claim to have solved.

Sound money here meant price stability, and Sir Robert Hall admitted that “there has been a practically continuous rise in the price level. The rise in prices of manufactures since 1949 had in fact been 40 percent. The wage level had risen 70 percent.

Government pronouncements ever since 1944 had repeatedly insisted that wages ought not to rise more than in proportion to productivity. This formula meaning in effect price level of home production, embodies the incomes policy which is now professed by all parties. But it has never been enforced through monetary policy. It has only been enjoined by exhortation and persuasion. (p. ix)

The lack of commitment to a policy of stabilizing the price level was the key point for Hawtrey. If policy makers desired to control the rise in the price level by controlling the increase in incomes, they could, in Hawtrey’s view, only do so by way of a monetary policy whose goal was to keep total spending (and hence total income) at a level – or on a path – that was consistent with the price-level objective that policy-makers were aiming for. If there was also a goal of full employment, then the full-employment goal could be achieved only insofar as the wage rates arrived at in bargaining between labor and management were consistent with the targeted level of spending and income.

Incomes policy and monetary policy cannot be separated. Monetary policy includes all those measures by which the flow of money can be accelerated or retarded, and it is by them that the money value of a given structure of incomes is determined. If monetary policy is directed by some other criterion than the desired incomes policy, the income policy gives way to the other criterion. In particular, if monetary policy is directed to maintaining the money unit at a prescribed exchange rate parity, the level of incomes will adapt itself to this parity and not to the desired policy.

When the exchange parity of sterling was fixed in 1949 at $2.80, the pound had already been undervalued at the previous rate of $4.03. The British wage level was tied by the rate of exchange to the American. The level of incomes was predetermined, and there was no way for an incomes policy to depart from it. Economic forces came into operation to correct the undervaluation by an increase in the wage level. . . .

It was a paradox that the devaluation, which had been intended as a remedy for an adverse balance of payments, induced an inflation which was liable itself to cause an adverse balance. The undervaluation did indeed swell the demand for British exports, but when production passed the limit of capacity, and output could not be further increased, the monetary expansion continued by its own momentum. Demand expanded beyond output and attracted an excess of imports. There was no dilemma, because the employment situation and the balance of payments situation both required the same treatment, a monetary contraction. The contraction would not cause unemployment, provided it went no further than to eliminate over-employment.

The White Paper of 1956 on the Economic Implications of Full Employment, while confirming the Incomes Policy of price stabilization, placed definitely on the Government the responsibility for regulating the pressure of demand through “fiscal, monetary and social policies”. The Radcliffe Committee obtained from the Treasury the admission that this was not being done. No measures other than persuasion and exhortation were being taken to give effect to the incomes policy. Reluctant as the authorities were to resort to deflation, they nevertheless imposed a Bank rate of 7 per cent and other contractive measures to cope with a balance of payments crisis at the very moment when the Treasury representative were appearing before the Committee. But that did not mean that they were prepared to pursue a contractive policy in support of the incomes policy. The crises of 1957 and 1961 were no more than episodes, temporarily interfering with the policy of easy credit and expansion. The crisis of 1964-6 has been more than an episode, only because the deflationary measures were long delayed, and when taken, were half-hearted.

It would be unfair to impute the entire responsibility for these faults of policy to Ministers. They are guided by their advisers, and they can plead in their defence that their misconceptions have been shared by the vast majority of economists. . . .

The fault of traditional monetary theory has been that it is static, and that is still true of Keynes’s theory. But a peculiarity of monetary policy is that, whenever practical measures have to be taken, the situation is always one of transition, when the conditions of static equilibrium have been departed from. The task of policy is to decide the best way to get back to equilibrium, and very likely to choose which of several alternative equilibrium positions to aim at. . . .

An incomes policy, or a wages policy, is the indispensable means of stabilizing the money unit when an independent metallic standard has failed us. Such a policy can only be given effect by a regulation of credit. The world has had long experience of the regulation of credit for the maintenance of a metallic standard. Maintenance of a wages standard requires the same instruments but will be more exacting because it will be guided by many symptoms instead of exclusively by movements of gold, and because it will require unremitting vigilance instead of occasional interference. (pp. ix-xii)

The confusion identified by Hawtrey between an incomes policy aiming at achieving a level of income consistent with full employment at a given level of wages by the appropriate conduct of monetary policy and an incomes policy aiming at the direct control of wages was precisely the confusion that led to the consistent failure of British monetary policy after World War II and to the failure of Arthur Burns. The essence of an incomes policy was to control total spending by way of monetary policy while gaining the cooperation of labor unions and business to prevent wage increases that would be inconsistent with full employment at the targeted level of income. Only monetary policy could determine the level of income, and the only role of exhortation and persuasion or direct controls was to prevent excessive wage increases that would prevent full employment from being achieved at the targeted income level.

After the 1949 devaluation, the Labour government appealed to the labour unions, its chief constituency, not to demand wage increases larger than productivity increases, so that British exporters could maintain the competitive advantage provided them by devaluation. Understanding the protectionist motive for devaluation was to undervalue the pound with a view to promoting exports and discouraging imports, Hawtrey also explained why the protectionist goal had been subverted by the low interest-rate, expansionary monetary policy of the Labour government to keep unemployment well below 2 percent.

British wages rose therefore not only because the pound was undervalued, but because monetary expansion increased aggregate demand faster than the British productive capacity was increasing, adding further upward pressure on British wages and labor costs. Excess aggregate demand in Britain also meant that domestic output that might have been exported was instead sold to domestic customers, while drawing imports to satisfy the unmet demands of domestic consumers, so that the British trade balance showed little improvement notwithstanding a 40% devaluation.

In this analysis, Hawtrey anticipated Max Corden’s theory of exchange-rate protection in identifying the essential mechanism by which to manipulate a nominal exchange rate so as to subsidize the tradable-goods sector (domestic export industries and domestic import-competing industries) as a tight-money policy that creates an excess demand for cash, thereby forcing the public to reduce spending as they try to accumulate the desired increases in cash holdings. The reduced demand for home production as spending is reduced results in a shift of productive resources from the non-tradable- to the tradable-goods sector.

To sum up, what Burns might have learned from Hawtrey was that even if some form of control of wages was essential for maintaining full employment in an economic environment in which strong labor unions could bargain effectively with employers, that control over wages did not — and could not — free the central bank from its responsibility to control aggregate demand and the growth of total spending and income.

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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