Leon Berkelmans is in good company in defending the policy actions which have come to be described as 'currency wars'.
Ben Bernanke gave the same defence of the US Fed's actions while he was Chairman: while low interest rates and 'quantitative easing' (QE) may give the domestic economy an extra competitive advantage via a lower exchange rate, the whole world really benefits because of the extra growth in the domestic economy.
You could argue that the proper post-2008 settings for macro policy in the US (and other advanced economies) was to have less austerity (or better still, actual stimulus), rather than relying entirely on monetary policy.
Fiscal policy gives a more direct and powerful stimulus at the trough of the cycle without depreciating the exchange rate, while monetary policy is feeble in these circumstances. The extreme monetary settings (near-zero policy interest rates and huge excess central bank liquidity), while giving an abnormal boost to international competitiveness, distorted the longer-term price signals for both investors and savers.
QE was a desperate effort to compensate for recovery-sapping fiscal austerity, which was itself a product of political failings and serious macro policy misjudgments. QE might have been an admirable second-best policy, but it was still 'beggar-thy-neighbour'. [fold]
In any case, the 'currency wars' debate in the global setting has moved on.
Brazil, the leading complainant, has other more serious economic problems of its own making. India, whose central bank governor gave the most cogent criticism of the US depreciation strategy, is now recording the fastest growth of any major economy (quiet, sceptics!). And the US, whose QE set off the debate in the first place, is now in a stronger phase of the cycle, with its exchange rate substantially appreciating in the process.
The debate is not totally dead, however. It has reverted to an earlier phase, where US industry lobby-groups (and Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute) are once again targeting China's comparative advantage. The industry groups are insisting that a 'currency manipulation' chapter be included in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty soon to be debated in the US Congress.
To say the least, this is inconvenient for the success of the finely balanced TPP deliberations.
The attempt to include such a chapter is inappropriate, as it trespasses on the International Monetary Fund's territory. Moreover, at this late stage in the negotiations it would probably doom the whole exercise to failure. In any case, China has also moved on. With large capital outflows rather than inflows, its exchange rate is under downward (not upward) pressure against the greenback and its intervention is to support the renminbi, not to keep it from appreciating.
There are those as well who would turn this proposed amendment against its instigators. They would have a credible argument that the US itself was a 'currency manipulator' in the post-2008 recovery period, with the exchange rate held down by seriously imbalanced 'beggar-thy-neighbour' macro-policy settings.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Tim Evanson.
