purchasing power parity

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Competitive Devaluation Plus Monetary Expansion Does Create a Free Lunch

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.

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.

Hawtrey’s Good and Bad Trade, Part VI: Monetary Equilibrium under the Gold Standard

Published October 15, 2013 gold standard , Hawtrey , Milton Friedman , purchasing power parity 10 Comments
Tags: Donald McCloskey, Richard Zecher

In Chapter 9 of Good and Bad Trade, Hawtrey arrives at what he then regarded as the culmination of the earlier purely theoretical discussions of the determination of prices, incomes, and exchange rates under a fiat currency, by positing that the currencies of all countries were uniformly convertible into some fixed weight of gold.

We have shown that the rate of exchange tends to represent simply the ratio of the purchasing power of the two units of currency, and that when this ratio is disturbed, the rate of exchange, subject to certain fluctuations, follows it.

But having elucidated this point we can now pass to the much more important case of the international effects of a fluctuation experienced in a country using metal currency common to itself and its neighbours. Practiaclly all the great commercial nations of the world have now adopted gold as their standard of legal tender, and this completely alters the problem. (p. 102)

Ah, what a difference a century makes! At any rate after providing a detailed and fairly painstaking account of the process of international adjustment in response to a loss of gold in one country, explaining how the loss of gold would cause an increase in interest rates in the country that lost gold which would induce lending by other countries to the country experiencing monetary stringency, and tracing out further repercussions on the movement of exchange rates (within the limits set by gold import and export points, reflecting the cost of transporting gold) and domestic price levels, Hawtrey provides the following summary of his analysis

Gold flows from foreign countries ot the area of stringency in response to the high rate of interest, more quickly from the nearer and more slowly from the more distant countries. While this process is at work the rates of interests in foreign countries are raised, more in the nearer and less in the more distant countries. As soon as the bankers’ loans have been brought into the proper proportion to the stock of gold, the rate of interest reverts to the profit rate in the area of stringency, but the influx of gold continues from each foreign country until the average level of prices there has so far fallen that its divergence from the average level of prices in the area of stringency is no longer great enough to cover the cost of sending the gold.

So long as any country is actually exporting gold the rate of interest will there be maintained somewhat above the profit rate, so as to diminish the total amount of bankers’ loans pari passu with the stock of gold.

At the time when the export of gold ceases from any foreign country the rate of exchange in that country on the area of stringency is at the export specie point; and the exchange will remain at this point indefinitely unless some new influence arises to disturb the equilibrium. In fact, the whole economic system will, the absence of such influence, revert to the stable conditions from which it started. (p. 113)

In subsequent writings, Hawtrey modified his account of the adjustment process in an important respect. I have not identified where and when Hawtrey first revised his view of the adjustment process, but, almost twenty years later in his book The Art of Central Banking, there is an exceptionally clear explanation of the defective nature of the account of the international adjustment mechanism provided in Good and Bad Trade. Iin the course of an extended historical discussion of how the Bank of England had used its lending rate as an instrument of policy in the nineteenth and earl twentieth centuries (a discussion later expanded upon in Hawtrey’s A Century of Bank Rate), Hawtrey quoted the following passage from the Cunliffe Report of 1918 recommending that England quickly restore the gold standard at the prewar parity. The passage provides an explanation of how, under the gold standard, the Bank of England, faced with an outflow of its gold reserves, could restore an international equilibrium by raising Bank Rate. The explanation in the Cunliffe Report deploys essentially the same reasoning reflected above in the quotation from p. 113 of Good and Bad Trade.

The raising of the discount rate had the immediate effect of retaining money here which would otherwise have been remitted abroad, and of attracting remittances from abroad to take advantage of the higher rate, thus checking the outflow of gold and even reversing the stream.

If the adverse conditions of the exchanges was due not merely to seasonal fluctuations but to circumstances tending to create a permanently adverse trade balance, it is obvious that the procedure above described would not have been sufficient. It would have resulted in the creation of a volume of short-dated indebtedness to foreign countries, which would have been in the end disastrous to our credit and the position of London as the financial centre of the world. But the raising of the Bank’s discount rate and the steps taken to make it effective in the market necessarily led to a general rise of interest rates and a restriction of credit. New enterprises were therefore postponed, and the demand for constructional materials and other capital goods was lessened. The consequent slackening of employment also diminished the demand for consumable goods, while holders of stocks of commodities carried largely with borrowed money, being confronted with an increase in interest charges, if not with actual difficulty in renewing loans, and with the prospect of falling prices, tended to press their goods on a weak market. The result was a decline in general prices in the home market which, by checking imports and stimulating exports, corrected the adverse trade balance which was the primary cause of the difficulty. (Interim Report of the Cunliffe Committee, sections 4-5)

Hawtrey took strong issue with the version of the adjustment process outlined in the Cunliffe Report, though acknowledging that ithe Cunliffe Report did in some sense reflect the orthodox view of how variations in Bank Rate achieved an international adjustment.

This passage expresses very fairly the principle on which the Bank of England had been regulating credit from 1866 to 1914. They embody the art of central banking as it was understood in the half-century preceding the war. In view of the experience which has been obtained, the progress made in theory and the changes which have occurred since 1914, the principles of the art require reconsideration at the present day.

The Cunliffe Committee’s version of the effect of Bank rate upon the trade balance was based on exactly the same Ricardian theory of foreign trade as Horsely Palmer’s. It depended on adjustments of the price level. But the revolutionary changes in the means of communication during the past hundred years have unified markets to such a degree that for any of the commodities which enter regularly into international trade there is practically a single world market and a single world price. That does not mean absolutely identical prices for the same commodity at different places, but prices differing only by the cost of transport from exporting to the importing centres. Local divergences of prices form this standard are small and casual, and are speedily eliminated so long as markets work freely.

In Ricardo’s day, relatively considerable differences of price were possible between distant centres. The merchant could never have up-to-date information at one place of the price quotations at another. When he heard that the price of a commodity at a distant place had been relatively high weeks or months before, he was taking a risk in shipping a cargo thither, because the market might have changes for the worse before the cargo arrived. Under such conditions, it might well be that a substantial difference of price level was required to attract goods from one country to another.

Nevertheless it was fallacious ot explain the adjustment wholly in terms of the price level. There was, even at that time, an approximation to a world price. When the difference of price level attracted goods from one country to another, the effect was to diminish the difference of price level, and probably after an interval to eliminate it altogether (apart from cost of transport). When that occurred, the importing country was suffering an adverse balance, not on account of an excess price level, but on account of an excess demand at the world price level. Whether there be a difference of price level or not, it is this difference of demand that is the fundamental factor.

In Horsely Palmer‘s day the accepted theory was that the rate of discount affected the price level because it affected the amount of note issue and therefore the quantity of currency. That did not mean that the whole doctrine depended on the quantity theory of money. All that had currency so far tended to cause a rise or fall of the price level that any required rise or fall of prices could be secured by an appropriate expansion or contraction of the currency that is a very different thing from saying that the rise or fall of the price level would be exactly proportional to the expansion or contraction of the currency.

But it is not really necessary to introduce the quantity of currency into the analysis at all. What governs demand in any community is the consumers’ income (the total of all incomes expressed in terms of money) and consumers’ outlay (the total of all disbursements out of income, including investment).

The final sentence seems to be somewhat overstated, but in the context of a gold standard, in which the quantity of currency is endogenously determined, the quantity of currency is determined not determining. After noticing that Hawtrey anticipated Cassel in formulating the purchasing power parity doctrine, I looked again at the excellent paper by McCloskey and Zecher “The Success of Purchasing Power Parity” in the NBER volume A Retrospective on the Classical Gold Standard 1821-1931, edited by Bordo and Schwartz, a sequel to their earlier paper, “How the Gold Standard Worked” in The Monetary Approach to the Balance of Payments, edited by Johnson and Frenkel. The paper on purchasing power parity makes some very powerful criticisms of the Monetary History of the United States by Friedman and Schwartz, some of which Friedman responded to in his formal discussion of the paper. But clearly the main point on which McCloskey and Zecher took issue with Friedman and Schwartz was whether an internationally determined price level under the gold standard tightly constrained national price levels regardless of the quantity of local money. McCloskey and Zecher argued that it did, while Friedman and Schwartz maintained that variations in the quantity of national money, even under the gold standard, could have significant effects on prices and nominal income, at least in the short to medium term. As Friedman put it in his comment on McCloskey and Zecher:

[W]hile the quantity of money is ultimately an endogenous variable [under fixed exchange rates], there can be and is much leeway in the short run, before the external forces overwhelm the independent internal effects. And we have repeatedly been surprised in our studies by how much leeway there is and for how long – frequently a number of years.

I’ll let Friedman have the last word on this point, except to note that Hawtrey clearly would have disagreed with him post, at least subsequently to his writing Good and Bad Trade.

Hawtrey’s Good and Bad Trade, Part V: Did Hawtrey Discover PPP?

Published October 8, 2013 Cassel , Hawtrey , monetary theory , purchasing power parity 2 Comments
Tags: Cassel, Hawtrey, PPP

The first seven chapters of Hawtrey’s Good and Bad Trade present an admirably succinct exposition of the theory of a fiat monetary system with a banking system that issues a credit money convertible into the fiat money supplied by the government. Hawtrey also explains how cyclical fluctuations in output, employment and prices could arise in such a system, given that the interest rates set by banks in the course of their lending operations inevitably deviate, even if for no more than very short periods of time, from what he calls their natural levels. See the wonderful quotation (from pp. 76-77) in my previous post about the inherent instability of the equilibrium between the market rate set by banks and the natural rate.

In chapter 7, Hawtrey considers an international system of fiat currencies, each one issued by the government of a single country in which only that currency (or credit money convertible into that currency) is acceptable as payment. Hawtrey sets as his objective an explanation of the exchange rates between pairs of such currencies and the corresponding price levels in those countries. In summing up his discussion (pp. 90-93) of what determines the rate of exchange between any two currencies, Hawtrey makes the following observation

Practically, it may be said that the rate of exchange equates the general level of prices of commodities in one country with that in the other. This is of course only approximately true, since the rate of exchange is affected only by those commodities which are or might be transported between the two countries. If one of the two countries is at a disadvantage in the production of commodities which cannot be imported, or indeed in those which can only be imported at a specially heavy cost, the general level of prices, calculated fairly over all commodities, will be higher in that country than in the other. But, subject to this important qualification, the rate of exchange under stable conditions does represent that ratio between the units of currency which makes the price-levels and therefore the purchasing powers of the two units equal. (pp. 92-93)

That, of course, is a terse, but characteristically precise, statement of the purchasing power parity doctrine. What makes it interesting, and possibly noteworthy, is that Hawtrey made it 100 years ago, in 1913, which is five years before Hawtrey’s older contemporary, Gustav Cassel, who is usually credited with having originated the doctrine in 1918 in his paper “Abnormal Deviations in International Exchanges” Economic Journal 28:413-15. Here’s how Cassel put it:

According to the theory of international exchanges which I have tried to develop during the course of the war, the rate of exchange between two countries is primarily determined by the quotient between the internal purchasing power against goods of the money of each country. The general inflation which has taken place during the war has lowered this purchasing power in all countries, though in a very different degree, and the rates of exchanges should accordingly be expected to deviate from their old parity in proportion to the inflation in each country.

At every moment the real parity between two countries is represented by this quotient between the purchasing power of the money in the one country and the other. I propose to call this parity “the purchasing power parity.” As long as anything like free movement of merchandise and a somewhat comprehensive trade between two countries takes place, the actual rate of exchange cannot deviate very much from this purchasing power parity. (p. 413)

Hawtrey proceeds, in the rest of the chapter, to explain how international relationships would be affected by a contraction in the currency of one country. The immediate effects would be the same as those described in the case of a single closed economy. However, in an international system, the effects of a contraction in one country would create opportunities for international transactions, both real and financial, that would involve both countries in the adjustment to the initial monetary disturbance originating in one of them.

Hawtrey sums up the discussion about the adjustment to a contraction of the currency of one country as follows:

From the above description, which is necessarily rather complicated, it will be seen that the mutual influence of two areas with independent currency systems is on the whole not very great Indeed, the only important consequence to either of a contraction of currency in the other, is the tendency for the first to lend money to the second in order to get the benefit of the high rate of interest. This hastens the movement towards ultimate equilibrium in the area of stringency. At the same time it would raise the rate of interest slightly in the other country But as this rise in the rate of interest is due to an enhanced demand for loans, it will not have the effect of diminishing the total stock of bankers’ money. (p. 99)

He concludes the chapter with a refinement of the purchasing power parity doctrine.

It is important to notice that as soon as the assumption of stable conditions is abandoned the rate of exchange ceases to represent the ratio of the purchasing powers of the two units of currency which it relates. A difference between the rates of interest in the two countries concerned displaces the rate of exchange from its normal position of equality with this ratio, in the same direction as if the purchasing power of the currency with the higher rate of interest had been increased. Such a divergence between the rates of interest would only occur in case of some financial disturbance, and though such disturbances, great or small, are bound to be frequent, the ratio of purchasing powers may still be taken (subject to the qualification previously explained) to be the normal significance of the rate of exchange. (p. 101)

On the Manipulation of Currencies

Published November 2, 2012 Cassel , currency manipulation , Keynes , purchasing power parity , Wall Street Journal 38 Comments

Mitt Romney is promising to declare China a currency manipulator on “day one” of his new administration. Why? Ostensibly, because Mr. Romney, like so many others, believes that the Chinese are somehow interfering with the foreign-exchange markets and holding the exchange rate of their currency (confusingly called both the yuan and the remnibi) below its “true” value. But the other day, Mary Anastasia O’Grady, a member of the editorial board of the avidly pro-Romeny Wall Street Journal, wrote an op-ed piece (“Ben Bernanke: Currency Manipulator” ) charging that Bernanke is no less a currency manipulator than those nasty Chinese Communists. Why? Well, that was not exactly clear, but it seemed to have something to do with the fact that Mr. Bernanke, seeking to increase the pace of our current anemic recovery, is conducting a policy of monetary expansion to speed the recovery.

So, is what Mr. Bernanke is doing (or supposed to be doing) really the same as what the Chinese are doing (or supposed to be doing)?

Well, obviously it is not. What the Chinese are accused of doing is manipulating the yuan’s exchange rate by, somehow, intervening in the foreign-exchange market to prevent the yuan from rising to its “equilibrium” value against the dollar. The allegation against Mr. Bernanke is that he is causing the exchange rate of the dollar to fall against other currencies by increasing the quantity of dollars in circulation. But given the number of dollars in circulation, the foreign-exchange market is establishing a price that reflects the “equilibrium” value of dollars against any other currency. Mr. Bernanke is not setting the value of the dollar in foreign-exchange markets, as the Chinese are accused of doing to the dollar/yuan exchange rate. Even if he wanted to control the exchange value of the dollar, it is not directly within Mr. Bernanke’s power to control the value that participants in the foreign-exchange markets attach to the dollar relative to other currencies.

But perhaps this is too narrow a view of what Mr. Bernanke is up to. If the Chinese government wants the yuan to have a certain exchange value against the dollar and other currencies, all it has to do is to create (or withdraw) enough yuan to ensure that the value of yuan on the foreign-exchange markets falls (or rises) to its target. In the limit, the Chinese government could peg its exchange rate against the dollar (or against any other currency or any basket of currencies) by offering to buy and sell dollars (or any other currency or any basket of currencies) in unlimited quantities at the pegged rate with the yuan. Does that qualify as currency manipulation? For a very long time, pegged or fixed exchange rates in which countries maintained fixed exchange rates against all other currencies was the rule, not the exception, except that the pegged rate was most often a fixed price for gold or silver rather than a fixed price for a particular currency. No one ever said that simply maintaining a fixed exchange rate between one currency and another or between one currency and a real commodity is a form of currency manipulation. And for some 40 years, since the demise of the Bretton Woods system, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has been tirelessly advocating restoration of a system of fixed exchange rates, or, ideally, restoration of a gold standard. And now the Journal is talking about currency manipulation?

So it’s all very confusing. To get a better handle on the question of currency manipulation, I suggest going back to a classic statement of the basic issue by none other than John Maynard Keynes in a book, A Tract on Monetary Reform, that he published in 1923, when the world was trying to figure out how to reconstruct an international system of monetary arrangements to replace the prewar international gold standard, which had been one of the first casualties of the outbreak of World War I.

Since . . . the rate of exchange of a country’s currency with the currency of the rest of the world (assuming for the sake of simplicity that there is only one external currency) depends on the relation between the internal price level and the external price level [i.e., the price level of the rest of the world], it follows that the exchange cannot be stable unless both internal and external price levels remain stable. If, therefore, the external price level lies outside our control, we must submit either to our own internal price level or to our exchange rate being pulled about by external influences. If the external price level is unstable, we cannot keep both our own price level and our exchanges stable. And we are compelled to choose.

I like to call this proposition – that a country can control either its internal price level or the exchange rate of its currency, but cannot control both — Keynes’s Law, though Keynes did not discover it and was not the first to articulate it (but no one else did so as succinctly and powerfully as he). So, according to Keynes, whether a country pegs its exchange rate or controls its internal price level would not matter if the price level in the rest of the world were stable, because in that case for any internal price level there would be a corresponding exchange rate and for every exchange rate there would be a corresponding internal price level. For a country to reduce its own exchange rate to promote exports would not work, because the low exchange rate would cause its internal prices to rise correspondingly, thereby eliminating any competitive advantage for its products in international trade. This principle, closely related to the idea of purchasing power parity (a concept developed by Gustav Cassel), implies that currency manipulation is not really possible, except for transitory periods, because prices adjust to nullify any temporary competitive advantage associated with a weak, or undervalued, currency. An alternative way of stating the principle is that a country can control its nominal exchange rate, but cannot control its real exchange rate, i.e, the exchange rate adjusted for price-level differences. If exchange rates and price levels tend to adjust to maintain purchasing power parity across currency areas, currency manipulation is an exercise in futility.

That, at any rate, is what the theory says. But for any proposition derived from economic theory, it is usually possible to come up with exceptions by altering the assumptions. Now for Keynes’s Law, there are two mechanisms causing prices to rise faster in a country with an undervalued currency than they do elsewhere. First, price arbitrage between internationally traded products tends to equalize prices in all locations after adjusting for exchange rate differentials. If it is cheaper for Americans to buy wheat in Winnipeg than in Wichita at the current exchange rate between the US and Canadian dollars, Americans will buy wheat in Winnipeg rather than Wichita forcing the Wichita price down until buying wheat in Wichita is again economical. But the arbitrage mechanism works rapidly only for internationally traded commodities like wheat. Many commodities, especially factors of production, like land and labor, are not tradable, so that price differentials induced by an undervalued exchange rate cannot be eliminated by direct arbitrage. But there is another mechanism operating to force prices in the country with an undervalued exchange rate to rise faster than elsewhere, which is that the competitive advantage from an undervalued currency induces an inflow of cash from other countries importing those cheap products, the foreign cash influx, having been exchanged for domestic cash, becoming an additional cause of rising domestic prices. The influx of cash won’t stop until purchasing power parity is achieved, and the competitive advantage eliminated.

What could prevent this automatic adjustment process from eliminating the competitive advantage created by an undervalued currency? In principle, it would be possible to interrupt the process of international arbitrage tending to equalize the prices of internationally traded products by imposing tariffs or quotas on imports or by imposing exchange controls on the movement of capital across borders. All of those restrictions or taxes on international transactions prevent the price equalization implied by Keynes’s Law and purchasing power parity from actually occurring. But after the steady trend of liberalization since World War II, these restrictions, though plenty remain, are less important than they used to be, and a web of international agreements, codified by the International Trade Organization, makes resorting to them a lot trickier than it used to be.

That leaves another, less focused, method by which governments can offer protection from international competition to certain industries or groups. The method is precisely for the government and the monetary authority to do what Keynes’s Law says can’t be done: to choose an exchange rate that undervalues the currency, thereby giving an extra advantage or profit cushion to all producers of tradable products (i.e., export industries and import-competing industries), perhaps spreading the benefits of protection more widely than governments, if their choices were not restricted by international agreements, would wish. However, to prevent the resulting inflow of foreign cash from driving up domestic prices and eliminating any competitive advantage, the monetary authority must sterilize the induced cash inflows by selling assets to mop up the domestic currency just issued in exchange for the foreign cash directed toward domestic exporters. (The classic analysis of such a policy was presented by Max Corden in his paper “Exchange Rate Protection,” reprinted in his Production, Growth, and Trade: Essays in International Economics.) But to borrow a concept from Austrian Business Cycle Theory, this may not be a sustainable long-run policy for a central bank, because maintaining the undervalued exchange rate would require the central bank to keep accumulating foreign-exchange reserves indefinitely, while selling off domestic assets to prevent the domestic money supply from increasing. The central bank might even run out of domestic assets with which to mop up the currency created to absorb the inflow of foreign cash. But in a rapidly expanding economy (like China’s), the demand for currency may be growing so rapidly that the domestic currency created in exchange for the inflow of foreign currency can be absorbed by the public without creating any significant upward pressure on prices necessitating a sell-off of domestic assets to prevent an outbreak of domestic inflation.

It is thus the growth in, and the changing composition of, the balance sheet of China’s central bank rather than the value of the dollar/yuan exchange rate that tells us whether the Chinese are engaging in currency manipulation. To get some perspective on how the balance sheet of Chinese central banks has been changing, consider that Chinese nominal GDP in 2009 was about 2.5 times as large as it was in 2003 while Chinese holdings of foreign exchange reserves in 2009 were more than 5 times greater than those holdings were in 2003. This means that the rate of growth (about 25% a year) in foreign-exchange reserves held by the Chinese central bank between 2003 and 2009 was more than twice as great as the rate of growth in Chinese nominal GDP over the same period. Over that period, the share of the total assets of the Chinese central bank represented by foreign exchange has grown from 48% in December 2003 to almost 80% in December 2010. Those changes are certainly consistent with the practice of currency manipulation. However, except for 2009, there was no year since 2000 in which the holdings of domestic assets by the Chinese central bank actually fell, suggesting that there has been very little actual sterilization undertaken by the Chinese central bank. If there has indeed been no (or almost no) actual sterilization by the Chinese central bank, then, despite my long-standing suspicions about what the Chinese have been doing, I cannot conclude that the Chinese have been engaging in currency manipulation. But perhaps one needs to look more closely at the details of how the balance sheet of the Chinese central bank has been changing over time. I would welcome the thoughts of others on how to interpret evidence of how the balance sheet of the Chinese central bank has been changing.

At any rate, to come back to Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s assertion that Ben Bernanke is guilty of currency manipulation, her accusation, based on the fact that Bernanke is expanding the US money supply, is clearly incompatible with Max Corden’s exchange-rate-protection model. In Corden’s model, undervaluation is achieved by combining a tight monetary policy that sterilizes (by open-market sales!) the inflows induced by an undervalued exchange rate. But, according to Mrs. O’Grady, Bernanke is guilty of currency manipulation, because he is conducting open-market purchases, not open-market sales! So Mrs. O’Grady has got it exactly backwards. But, then, what would you expect from a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board?

PS I have been falling way behind in responding to recent comments. I hope to catch up over the weekend as well as write up something on medium of account vs. medium of exchange.

PPS Thanks to my commenters for providing me with a lot of insight into how the Chinese operate their monetary and banking systems. My frequent commenter J.P. Koning has an excellent post and a terrific visual chart on his blog Moneyness showing the behavior over time of the asset and liability sides of the Chinese central bank. Scott Sumner has also added an excellent discussion of his own about what Chinese monetary policy is all about. I am trying to assimilate the various responses and hope to have a further post on the subject in the next day or two.

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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Competitive Devaluation Plus Monetary Expansion Does Create a Free Lunch

Hawtrey’s Good and Bad Trade, Part VI: Monetary Equilibrium under the Gold Standard

Hawtrey’s Good and Bad Trade, Part V: Did Hawtrey Discover PPP?

On the Manipulation of Currencies

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