| Tweet |
(回答先: 円よ、お前はもう死んでいる!?〜CFRが米ドル・ユーロ・汎アジア通貨の3本立て通貨体制を主張 投稿者 こげぱん 日時 2007 年 5 月 23 日 22:36:26)
日本語はそのうち論座あたりに出るだろうから、原文のみで失礼。
------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070501faessay86308/benn-steil/the-end-of-national-currency.html
*The End of National Currency*
By Benn Steil
>From /Foreign Affairs/, May/June 2007
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Summary: Global financial instability has sparked a surge in "monetary
nationalism" -- the idea that countries must make and control their own
currencies. But globalization and monetary nationalism are a dangerous
combination, a cause of financial crises and geopolitical tension. The
world needs to abandon unwanted currencies, replacing them with dollars,
euros, and multinational currencies as yet unborn.
/ Benn Steil is Director of International Economics at the Council on
Foreign Relations and a co-author of Financial Statecraft. /
THE RISE OF MONETARY NATIONALISM
Capital flows have become globalization's Achilles' heel. Over the past
25 years, devastating currency crises have hit countries across Latin
America and Asia, as well as countries just beyond the borders of
western Europe -- most notably Russia and Turkey. Even such an
impeccably credentialed pro-globalization economist as U.S. Federal
Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin has acknowledged that "opening up the
financial system to foreign capital flows has led to some disastrous
financial crises causing great pain, suffering, and even violence."
The economics profession has failed to offer anything resembling a
coherent and compelling response to currency crises. International
Monetary Fund (IMF) analysts have, over the past two decades, endorsed a
wide variety of national exchange-rate and monetary policy regimes that
have subsequently collapsed in failure. They have fingered numerous
culprits, from loose fiscal policy and poor bank regulation to bad
industrial policy and official corruption. The financial-crisis
literature has yielded policy recommendations so exquisitely hedged and
widely contradicted as to be practically useless.
Antiglobalization economists have turned the problem on its head by
absolving governments (except the one in Washington) and instead blaming
crises on markets and their institutional supporters, such as the IMF --
"dictatorships of international finance," in the words of the Nobel
laureate Joseph Stiglitz. "Countries are effectively told that if they
don't follow certain conditions, the capital markets or the IMF will
refuse to lend them money," writes Stiglitz. "They are basically forced
to give up part of their sovereignty."
Is this right? Are markets failing, and will restoring lost sovereignty
to governments put an end to financial instability? This is a dangerous
misdiagnosis. In fact, capital flows became destabilizing only after
countries began asserting "sovereignty" over money -- detaching it from
gold or anything else considered real wealth. Moreover, even if the
march of globalization is not inevitable, the world economy and the
international financial system have evolved in such a way that there is
no longer a viable model for economic development outside of them.
The right course is not to return to a mythical past of monetary
sovereignty, with governments controlling local interest and exchange
rates in blissful ignorance of the rest of the world. Governments must
let go of the fatal notion that nationhood requires them to make and
control the money used in their territory. National currencies and
global markets simply do not mix; together they make a deadly brew of
currency crises and geopolitical tension and create ready pretexts for
damaging protectionism. In order to globalize safely, countries should
abandon monetary nationalism and abolish unwanted currencies, the source
of much of today's instability.
THE GOLDEN AGE
Capital flows were enormous, even by contemporary standards, during the
last great period of "globalization," from the late nineteenth century
to the outbreak of World War I. Currency crises occurred during this
period, but they were generally shallow and short-lived. That is because
money was then -- as it has been throughout most of the world and most
of human history -- gold, or at least a credible claim on gold. Funds
flowed quickly back to crisis countries because of confidence that the
gold link would be restored. At the time, monetary nationalism was
considered a sign of backwardness, adherence to a universally
acknowledged standard of value a mark of civilization. Those nations
that adhered most reliably (such as Australia, Canada, and the United
States) were rewarded with the lowest international borrowing rates.
Those that adhered the least (such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile) were
punished with the highest.
This bond was fatally severed during the period between World War I and
World War II. Most economists in the 1930s and 1940s considered it
obvious that capital flows would become destabilizing with the end of
reliably fixed exchange rates. Friedrich Hayek noted in a 1937 lecture
that under a credible gold-standard regime, "short-term capital
movements will on the whole tend to relieve the strain set up by the
original cause of a temporarily adverse balance of payments. If
exchanges, however, are variable, the capital movements will tend to
work in the same direction as the original cause and thereby to
intensify it" -- as they do today.
The belief that globalization required hard money, something foreigners
would willingly hold, was widespread. The French economist Charles Rist
observed that "while the theorizers are trying to persuade the public
and the various governments that a minimum quantity of gold ... would
suffice to maintain monetary confidence, and that anyhow paper currency,
even fiat currency, would amply meet all needs, the public in all
countries is busily hoarding all the national currencies which are
supposed to be convertible into gold." This view was hardly limited to
free marketeers. As notable a critic of the gold standard and global
capitalism as Karl Polanyi took it as obvious that monetary nationalism
was incompatible with globalization. Focusing on the United Kingdom's
interest in growing world trade in the nineteenth century, he argued
that "nothing else but commodity money could serve this end for the
obvious reason that token money, whether bank or fiat, cannot circulate
on foreign soil." Yet what Polanyi considered nonsensical -- global
trade in goods, services, and capital intermediated by intrinsically
worthless national paper (or "fiat") monies -- is exactly how
globalization is advancing, ever so fitfully, today.
The political mythology associating the creation and control of money
with national sovereignty finds its economic counterpart in the
metamorphosis of the famous theory of "optimum currency areas" (OCA).
Fathered in 1961 by Robert Mundell, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who
has long been a prolific advocate of shrinking the number of national
currencies, it became over the subsequent decades a quasi-scientific
foundation for monetary nationalism.
Mundell, like most macroeconomists of the early 1960s, had a now largely
discredited postwar Keynesian mindset that put great faith in the
ability of policymakers to fine-tune national demand in the face of what
economists call "shocks" to supply and demand. His seminal article, "A
Theory of Optimum Currency Areas," asks the question, "What is the
appropriate domain of the currency area?" "It might seem at first that
the question is purely academic," he observes, "since it hardly appears
within the realm of political feasibility that national currencies would
ever be abandoned in favor of any other arrangement."
Mundell goes on to argue for flexible exchange rates between regions of
the world, each with its own multinational currency, rather than between
nations. The economics profession, however, latched on to Mundell's
analysis of the merits of flexible exchange rates in dealing with
economic shocks affecting different "regions or countries" differently;
they saw it as a rationale for treating existing nations as natural
currency areas. Monetary nationalism thereby acquired a rational
scientific mooring. And from then on, much of the mainstream economics
profession came to see deviations from "one nation, one currency" as
misguided, at least in the absence of prior political integration.
The link between money and nationhood having been established by
economists (much in the way that Aristotle and Jesus were reconciled by
medieval scholastics), governments adopted OCA theory as the primary
intellectual defense of monetary nationalism. Brazilian central bankers
have even defended the country's monetary independence by publicly
appealing to OCA theory -- against Mundell himself, who spoke out on the
economic damage that sky-high interest rates (the result of maintaining
unstable national monies that no one wants to hold) impose on Latin
American countries. Indeed, much of Latin America has already
experienced "spontaneous dollarization": despite restrictions in many
countries, U.S. dollars represent over 50 percent of bank deposits. (In
Uruguay, the figure is 90 percent, reflecting the appeal of Uruguay's
lack of currency restrictions and its famed bank secrecy.) This
increasingly global phenomenon of people rejecting national monies as a
store of wealth has no place in OCA theory.
NO TURNING BACK
Just a few decades ago, vital foreign investment in developing countries
was driven by two main motivations: to extract raw materials for export
and to gain access to local markets heavily protected against
competition from imports. Attracting the first kind of investment was
simple for countries endowed with the right natural resources.
(Companies readily went into war zones to extract oil, for example.)
Governments pulled in the second kind of investment by erecting tariff
and other barriers to competition so as to compensate foreigners for an
otherwise unappealing business climate. Foreign investors brought money
and know-how in return for monopolies in the domestic market.
This cozy scenario was undermined by the advent of globalization. Trade
liberalization has opened up most developing countries to imports (in
return for export access to developed countries), and huge declines in
the costs of communication and transport have revolutionized the
economics of global production and distribution. Accordingly, the
reasons for foreign companies to invest in developing countries have
changed. The desire to extract commodities remains, but companies
generally no longer need to invest for the sake of gaining access to
domestic markets. It is generally not necessary today to produce in a
country in order to sell in it (except in large economies such as Brazil
and China).
At the same time, globalization has produced a compelling new reason to
invest in developing countries: to take advantage of lower production
costs by integrating local facilities into global chains of production
and distribution. Now that markets are global rather than local,
countries compete with others for investment, and the factors defining
an attractive investment climate have changed dramatically. Countries
can no longer attract investors by protecting them against competition;
now, since protection increases the prices of goods that foreign
investors need as production inputs, it actually reduces global
competitiveness.
In a globalizing economy, monetary stability and access to sophisticated
financial services are essential components of an attractive local
investment climate. And in this regard, developing countries are
especially poorly positioned.
Traditionally, governments in the developing world exercised strict
control over interest rates, loan maturities, and even the beneficiaries
of credit -- all of which required severing financial and monetary links
with the rest of the world and tightly controlling international capital
flows. As a result, such flows occurred mainly to settle trade
imbalances or fund direct investments, and local financial systems
remained weak and underdeveloped. But growth today depends more and more
on investment decisions funded and funneled through the global financial
system. (Borrowing in low-cost yen to finance investments in Europe
while hedging against the yen's rise on a U.S. futures exchange is no
longer exotic.) Thus, unrestricted and efficient access to this global
system -- rather than the ability of governments to manipulate parochial
monetary policies -- has become essential for future economic development.
But because foreigners are often unwilling to hold the currencies of
developing countries, those countries' local financial systems end up
being largely isolated from the global system. Their interest rates tend
to be much higher than those in the international markets and their
lending operations extremely short -- not longer than a few months in
most cases. As a result, many developing countries are dependent on U.S.
dollars for long-term credit. This is what makes capital flows, however
necessary, dangerous: in a developing country, both locals and
foreigners will sell off the local currency en masse at the earliest
whiff of devaluation, since devaluation makes it more difficult for the
country to pay its foreign debts -- hence the dangerous instability of
today's international financial system.
Although OCA theory accounts for none of these problems, they are grave
obstacles to development in the context of advancing globalization.
Monetary nationalism in developing countries operates against the grain
of the process -- and thus makes future financial problems even more
likely.
MONEY IN CRISIS
Why has the problem of serial currency crises become so severe in recent
decades? It is only since 1971, when President Richard Nixon formally
untethered the dollar from gold, that monies flowing around the globe
have ceased to be claims on anything real. All the world's currencies
are now pure manifestations of sovereignty conjured by governments. And
the vast majority of such monies are unwanted: people are unwilling to
hold them as wealth, something that will buy in the future at least what
it did in the past. Governments can force their citizens to hold
national money by requiring its use in transactions with the state, but
foreigners, who are not thus compelled, will choose not to do so. And in
a world in which people will only willingly hold dollars (and a handful
of other currencies) in lieu of gold money, the mythology tying money to
sovereignty is a costly and sometimes dangerous one. Monetary
nationalism is simply incompatible with globalization. It has always
been, even if this has only become apparent since the 1970s, when all
the world's governments rendered their currencies intrinsically worthless.
Yet, perversely as a matter of both monetary logic and history, the most
notable economist critical of globalization, Stiglitz, has argued
passionately for monetary nationalism as the remedy for the economic
chaos caused by currency crises. When millions of people, locals and
foreigners, are selling a national currency for fear of an impending
default, the Stiglitz solution is for the issuing government to simply
decouple from the world: drop interest rates, devalue, close off
financial flows, and stiff the lenders. It is precisely this thinking, a
throwback to the isolationism of the 1930s, that is at the root of the
cycle of crisis that has infected modern globalization.
Argentina has become the poster child for monetary nationalists -- those
who believe that every country should have its own paper currency and
not waste resources hoarding gold or hard-currency reserves. Monetary
nationalists advocate capital controls to avoid entanglement with
foreign creditors. But they cannot stop there. As Hayek emphasized in
his 1937 lecture, "exchange control designed to prevent effectively the
outflow of capital would really have to involve a complete control of
foreign trade," since capital movements are triggered by changes in the
terms of credit on exports and imports.
Indeed, this is precisely the path that Argentina has followed since
2002, when the government abandoned its currency board, which tried to
fix the peso to the dollar without the dollars necessary to do so. Since
writing off $80 billion worth of its debts (75 percent in nominal
terms), the Argentine government has been resorting to ever more
intrusive means in order to prevent its citizens from protecting what
remains of their savings and buying from or selling to foreigners. The
country has gone straight back to the statist model of economic control
that has failed Latin America repeatedly over generations. The
government has steadily piled on more and more onerous capital and
domestic price controls, export taxes, export bans, and limits on
citizens' access to foreign currency. Annual inflation has nevertheless
risen to about 20 percent, prompting the government to make ham-fisted
efforts to manipulate the official price data. The economy has become
ominously dependent on soybean production, which surged in the wake of
price controls and export bans on cattle, taking the country back to the
pre-globalization model of reliance on a single commodity export for
hard-currency earnings. Despite many years of robust postcrisis economic
recovery, GDP is still, in constant U.S. dollars, 26 percent below its
peak in 1998, and the country's long-term economic future looks as
fragile as ever.
When currency crises hit, countries need dollars to pay off creditors.
That is when their governments turn to the IMF, the most demonized
institutional face of globalization. The IMF has been attacked by
Stiglitz and others for violating "sovereign rights" in imposing
conditions in return for loans. Yet the sort of compromises on policy
autonomy that sovereign borrowers strike today with the IMF were in the
past struck directly with foreign governments. And in the nineteenth
century, these compromises cut far more deeply into national autonomy.
Historically, throughout the Balkans and Latin America, sovereign
borrowers subjected themselves to considerable foreign control, at times
enduring what were considered to be egregious blows to independence.
Following its recognition as a state in 1832, Greece spent the rest of
the century under varying degrees of foreign creditor control; on the
heels of a default on its 1832 obligations, the country had its entire
finances placed under French administration. In order to return to the
international markets after 1878, the country had to precommit specific
revenues from customs and state monopolies to debt repayment. An 1887
loan gave its creditors the power to create a company that would
supervise the revenues committed to repayment. After a disastrous war
with Turkey over Crete in 1897, Greece was obliged to accept a control
commission, comprised entirely of representatives of the major powers,
that had absolute power over the sources of revenue necessary to fund
its war debt. Greece's experience was mirrored in Bulgaria, Serbia, the
Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and, of course, Argentina.
There is, in short, no age of monetary sovereignty to return to.
Countries have always borrowed, and when offered the choice between
paying high interest rates to compensate for default risk (which was
typical during the Renaissance) and paying lower interest rates in
return for sacrificing some autonomy over their ability to default
(which was typical in the nineteenth century), they have commonly chosen
the latter. As for the notion that the IMF today possesses some
extraordinary power over the exchange-rate policies of borrowing
countries, this, too, is historically inaccurate. Adherence to the
nineteenth-century gold standard, with the Bank of England at the helm
of the system, severely restricted national monetary autonomy, yet
governments voluntarily subjected themselves to it precisely because it
meant cheaper capital and greater trade opportunities.
THE MIGHTY DOLLAR?
For a large, diversified economy like that of the United States,
fluctuating exchange rates are the economic equivalent of a minor
toothache. They require fillings from time to time -- in the form of
corporate financial hedging and active global supply management -- but
never any major surgery. There are two reasons for this. First, much of
what Americans buy from abroad can, when import prices rise, quickly and
cheaply be replaced by domestic production, and much of what they sell
abroad can, when export prices fall, be diverted to the domestic market.
Second, foreigners are happy to hold U.S. dollars as wealth.
This is not so for smaller and less advanced economies. They depend on
imports for growth, and often for sheer survival, yet cannot pay for
them without dollars. What can they do? Reclaim the sovereignty they
have allegedly lost to the IMF and international markets by replacing
the unwanted national currency with dollars (as Ecuador and El Salvador
did half a decade ago) or euros (as Bosnia, Kosovo, and Montenegro did)
and thereby end currency crises for good. Ecuador is the shining example
of the benefits of dollarization: a country in constant political
turmoil has been a bastion of economic stability, with steady, robust
economic growth and the lowest inflation rate in Latin America. No
wonder its new leftist president, Rafael Correa, was obliged to ditch
his de-dollarization campaign in order to win over the electorate.
Contrast Ecuador with the Dominican Republic, which suffered a
devastating currency crisis in 2004 -- a needless crisis, as 85 percent
of its trade is conducted with the United States (a figure comparable to
the percentage of a typical U.S. state's trade with other U.S. states).
It is often argued that dollarization is only feasible for small
countries. No doubt, smallness makes for a simpler transition. But even
Brazil's economy is less than half the size of California's, and the
U.S. Federal Reserve could accommodate the increased demand for dollars
painlessly (and profitably) without in any way sacrificing its
commitment to U.S. domestic price stability. An enlightened U.S.
government would actually make it politically easier and less costly for
more countries to adopt the dollar by rebating the seigniorage profits
it earns when people hold more dollars. (To get dollars, dollarizing
countries give the Federal Reserve interest-bearing assets, such as
Treasury bonds, which the United States would otherwise have to pay
interest on.) The International Monetary Stability Act of 2000 would
have made such rebates official U.S. policy, but the legislation died in
Congress, unsupported by a Clinton administration that feared it would
look like a new foreign-aid program.
Polanyi was wrong when he claimed that because people would never accept
foreign fiat money, fiat money could never support foreign trade. The
dollar has emerged as just such a global money. This phenomenon was
actually foreseen by the brilliant German philosopher and sociologist
Georg Simmel in 1900. He surmised:
"Expanding economic relations eventually produce in the enlarged, and
finally international, circle the same features that originally
characterized only closed groups; economic and legal conditions overcome
the spatial separation more and more, and they come to operate just as
reliably, precisely and predictably over a great distance as they did
previously in local communities. To the extent that this happens, the
pledge, that is the intrinsic value of the money, can be reduced. ...
Even though we are still far from having a close and reliable
relationship within or between nations, the trend is undoubtedly in that
direction."
But the dollar's privileged status as today's global money is not
heaven-bestowed. The dollar is ultimately just another money supported
only by faith that others will willingly accept it in the future in
return for the same sort of valuable things it bought in the past. This
puts a great burden on the institutions of the U.S. government to
validate that faith. And those institutions, unfortunately, are failing
to shoulder that burden. Reckless U.S. fiscal policy is undermining the
dollar's position even as the currency's role as a global money is
expanding.
Four decades ago, the renowned French economist Jacques Rueff, writing
just a few years before the collapse of the Bretton Woods dollar-based
gold-exchange standard, argued that the system "attains such a degree of
absurdity that no human brain having the power to reason can defend it."
The precariousness of the dollar's position today is similar. The United
States can run a chronic balance-of-payments deficit and never feel the
effects. Dollars sent abroad immediately come home in the form of loans,
as dollars are of no use abroad. "If I had an agreement with my tailor
that whatever money I pay him he returns to me the very same day as a
loan," Rueff explained by way of analogy, "I would have no objection at
all to ordering more suits from him."
With the U.S. current account deficit running at an enormous 6.6 percent
of GDP (about $2 billion a day must be imported to sustain it), the
United States is in the fortunate position of the suit buyer with a
Chinese tailor who instantaneously returns his payments in the form of
loans -- generally, in the U.S. case, as purchases of U.S. Treasury
bonds. The current account deficit is partially fueled by the budget
deficit (a dollar more of the latter yields about 20-50 cents more of
the former), which will soar in the next decade in the absence of
reforms to curtail federal "entitlement" spending on medical care and
retirement benefits for a longer-living population. The United States --
and, indeed, its Chinese tailor -- must therefore be concerned with the
sustainability of what Rueff called an "absurdity." In the absence of
long-term fiscal prudence, the United States risks undermining the faith
foreigners have placed in its management of the dollar -- that is, their
belief that the U.S. government can continue to sustain low inflation
without having to resort to growth-crushing interest-rate hikes as a
means of ensuring continued high capital inflows.
PRIVATIZING MONEY
It is widely assumed that the natural alternative to the dollar as a
global currency is the euro. Faith in the euro's endurance, however, is
still fragile -- undermined by the same fiscal concerns that afflict the
dollar but with the added angst stemming from concerns about the
temptations faced by Italy and others to return to monetary nationalism.
But there is another alternative, the world's most enduring form of
money: gold.
It must be stressed that a well-managed fiat money system has
considerable advantages over a commodity-based one, not least of which
that it does not waste valuable resources. There is little to commend in
digging up gold in South Africa just to bury it again in Fort Knox. The
question is how long such a well-managed fiat system can endure in the
United States. The historical record of national monies, going back over
2,500 years, is by and large awful.
At the turn of the twentieth century -- the height of the gold standard
-- Simmel commented, "Although money with no intrinsic value would be
the best means of exchange in an ideal social order, until that point is
reached the most satisfactory form of money may be that which is bound
to a material substance." Today, with money no longer bound to any
material substance, it is worth asking whether the world even
approximates the "ideal social order" that could sustain a fiat dollar
as the foundation of the global financial system. There is no way
effectively to insure against the unwinding of global imbalances should
China, with over a trillion dollars of reserves, and other countries
with dollar-rich central banks come to fear the unbearable lightness of
their holdings.
So what about gold? A revived gold standard is out of the question. In
the nineteenth century, governments spent less than ten percent of
national income in a given year. Today, they routinely spend half or
more, and so they would never subordinate spending to the stringent
requirements of sustaining a commodity-based monetary system. But
private gold banks already exist, allowing account holders to make
international payments in the form of shares in actual gold bars.
Although clearly a niche business at present, gold banking has grown
dramatically in recent years, in tandem with the dollar's decline. A new
gold-based international monetary system surely sounds far-fetched. But
so, in 1900, did a monetary system without gold. Modern technology makes
a revival of gold money, through private gold banks, possible even
without government support.
COMMON CURRENCIES
Virtually every major argument recently leveled against globalization
has been leveled against markets generally (and, in turn, debunked) for
hundreds of years. But the argument against capital flows in a world
with 150 fluctuating national fiat monies is fundamentally different. It
is highly compelling -- so much so that even globalization's staunchest
supporters treat capital flows as an exception, a matter to be
intellectually quarantined until effective crisis inoculations can be
developed. But the notion that capital flows are inherently
destabilizing is logically and historically false. The lessons of
gold-based globalization in the nineteenth century simply must be
relearned. Just as the prodigious daily capital flows between New York
and California, two of the world's 12 largest economies, are so
uneventful that no one even notices them, capital flows between
countries sharing a single currency, such as the dollar or the euro,
attract not the slightest attention from even the most passionate
antiglobalization activists.
Countries whose currencies remain unwanted by foreigners will continue
to experiment with crisis-prevention policies, imposing capital controls
and building up war chests of dollar reserves. Few will repeat
Argentina's misguided efforts to fix a dollar exchange rate without the
dollars to do so. If these policies keep the IMF bored for a few more
years, they will be for the good.
But the world can do better. Since economic development outside the
process of globalization is no longer possible, countries should abandon
monetary nationalism. Governments should replace national currencies
with the dollar or the euro or, in the case of Asia, collaborate to
produce a new multinational currency over a comparably large and
economically diversified area.
Europeans used to say that being a country required having a national
airline, a stock exchange, and a currency. Today, no European country is
any worse off without them. Even grumpy Italy has benefited enormously
from the lower interest rates and permanent end to lira speculation that
accompanied its adoption of the euro. A future pan-Asian currency,
managed according to the same principle of targeting low and stable
inflation, would represent the most promising way for China to fully
liberalize its financial and capital markets without fear of damaging
renminbi speculation (the Chinese economy is only the size of
California's and Florida's combined). Most of the world's smaller and
poorer countries would clearly be best off unilaterally adopting the
dollar or the euro, which would enable their safe and rapid integration
into global financial markets. Latin American countries should
dollarize; eastern European countries and Turkey, euroize. Broadly
speaking, this prescription follows from relative trade flows, but there
are exceptions; Argentina, for example, does more eurozone than U.S.
trade, but Argentines think and save in dollars.
Of course, dollarizing countries must give up independent monetary
policy as a tool of government macroeconomic management. But since the
Holy Grail of monetary policy is to get interest rates down to the
lowest level consistent with low and stable inflation, an argument
against dollarization on this ground is, for most of the world,
frivolous. How many Latin American countries can cut interest rates
below those in the United States? The average inflation-adjusted lending
rate in Latin America is about 20 percent. One must therefore ask what
possible boon to the national economy developing-country central banks
can hope to achieve from the ability to guide nominal local rates up and
down on a discretionary basis. It is like choosing a Hyundai with manual
transmission over a Lexus with automatic: the former gives the driver
more control but at the cost of inferior performance under any condition.
As for the United States, it needs to perpetuate the sound money
policies of former Federal Reserve Chairs Paul Volcker and Alan
Greenspan and return to long-term fiscal discipline. This is the only
sure way to keep the United States' foreign tailors, with their massive
and growing holdings of dollar debt, feeling wealthy and secure. It is
the market that made the dollar into global money -- and what the market
giveth, the market can taketh away. If the tailors balk and the dollar
fails, the market may privatize money on its own.
▲このページのＴＯＰへ HOME > Ψ空耳の丘Ψ49掲示板
フォローアップ:
投稿コメント全ログ コメント即時配信 スレ建て依頼 削除コメント確認方法
題名には必ず「阿修羅さんへ」と記述してください。
掲示板,ＭＬを含むこのサイトすべての
一切の引用、転載、リンクを許可いたします。確認メールは不要です。
引用元リンクを表示してください。