On 12 March 2010, UNCTAD released its policy brief, titled “Global monetary chaos: Systemic failures need bold multilateral responses”. According to the brief, amidst continued financial crisis, the question of the global trade imbalances is back high on the international agenda. A procession of prominent economists, editorialists and politicians have taken it upon themselves to “remind” the surplus countries, and in particular the country with the biggest surplus, China, of their responsibility for a sound and balanced global recovery. The generally shared view is that this means permitting the value of the renminbi to be set freely by the “markets”, so that the country will export less and import and consume more, hence allowing the rest of the world to do the opposite. But is it reasonable to put the burden of rebalancing the global economy on a single country and its currency? This policy brief contends that the decision to leave currencies to the vagaries of the
market will not help rebalance the global economy. It argues that the problem lies in systemic failures, and as such, requires comprehensive and inclusive multilateral action.
The international community has allowed global monetary incoherence to reign before and after the crisis. Indeed, “markets” were permitted to manipulate currencies in a way that made some sovereign governments and central banks look like penniless orphans. The need for a new approach to global macro-economic governance is more urgent than ever, because today’s currency chaos has become a threat to international trade and could
be used as an alibi by major trading countries for resorting to protectionist measures.
In fact, the calm after the storm of the recent financial meltdown did not last for long. Institutional “investors” are back in business in global currency markets. With their resurgence, countries are again facing huge inflows of hot money that cannot be put to any productive use, but which create severe price misalignments and trade distortions. The global “casino”, nearly empty a year ago, is crowded again, and many new bets are on the table. However, the
recovery in the real economy is modest at best. In fact, the rebound of stocks, commodity futures and currency trade in several emerging and developing economies since March 2009 displays the makings of highly correlated big new bubbles and the threat of a new round of financial crisis. Of even greater concern is that the crisis notwithstanding, faith in “market fundamentalism” is unswerving. That faith continues to sustain the naïve belief that a solution
to misalignment may be found by leaving the determination of exchange rates to unregulated financial markets.
The effects of the new exuberance on financial markets are adverse for countries with once-fragile currencies, such as Brazil, Hungary and Turkey. Exploiting the differentials between interest rates, the so-called currency carry trade in these countries and in the big financial markets of the North has become even easier today. Rates in the North are generally close to zero, whereas maintaining “confidence” in countries with weaker currencies – under the aegis
of IMF programmes since the onset of the crisis – has called for higher rates than before. The first results of the new “confidence” in weak currencies are ominous. An appreciation of the Brazilian real and the Hungarian forint has forestalled urgently needed gains in competitiveness and could again lead to severe overvaluation, a dramatic distortion of trade patterns and new imbalances.
Recent actions taken by some developing economies, such as Brazil, to intervene in foreign exchange markets have to be evaluated in light of the dramatic failure of the currency markets to get the prices right. Re-imposing a 2% tax on purchases by foreign investors of real-denominated fixed-income securities and stocks, for example, is not a marketunfriendly policy. Rather, such measures serve to safeguard the efficiency of markets for goods and
services by protecting their prices from becoming a punching ball of financial market prices, which are driven by an undifferentiated (if not irrational) appetite for risk. In the brave new world of liberalized global trade and finance, the treasuries of sovereign governments of the largest developing economies – and even some developed countries – can be seriously challenged by the power of financial flows. And in the absence of a truly multilateral exchange
rate system, each country naturally pursues whatever works best in the circumstances.
In fact, as a response to the current global crisis that originated elsewhere, China has done more than any other emerging economy to stimulate domestic demand, and as a result its import volume has expanded significantly. Private consumption is rising at breakneck speed. According to several estimates, Chinese private consumption increased by 9% in 2009 in real terms, dwarfing all the other major countries’ attempts to revive
their domestic markets. But even in the preceding decade, real private consumption, at an average 8% growth rate, was an important driver of growth, backed by wage and salary increases in the two-digit range and strong productivity growth. Unit labour costs (nominal compensation divided by productivity) are rising more there than elsewhere, resulting in a continuous loss in competitive power even with a fixed exchange rate. Expecting that China will leave its exchange rate to the mercy of totally unreliable markets and risk a Japan-like appreciation shock ignores the importance of its domestic and external stability for the region and for the globe.
