I am posting the stuff below in anticipation that somebody will post the nonsense contained therein about interest rates and China's problems.Note: the stuff in square brakets has been added by me.
New post on Uneasy Money
Economic Prejudice and High-Minded Sloganeering
by David Glasner
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. [ For those that don't know. The policy of interest rate increases was a disaster]
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. [In other words. It only works if the money base does not expand so that prices internally stay the same, that is, don't go up.]
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?
