Paul Krugman comenta sobre a Guerra Cambial
outubro 4, 2010 | Publicado por Fernando Botti |
Artigo interessante de Paul Krugman no NY Times sobre os desdobramentos da guerra cambial promovida entre muitos países.
I’ve seen a number of people — most recently, Yglesias — suggesting that mutual attempts by major economies to depreciate their currencies could be really helpful right now. The intuition seems clear: it gets countries printing money; and there’s also the historical argument by Eichengreen that competitive devaluation in the 1930s was actually quite helpful.
But I don’t think this argument really works — at least not as phrased. The hypothesized currency war in which the Fed buys euros and the ECB buys dollars might not do any harm, but it probably wouldn’t help, either.
Why? In the 1930s, competitive devaluation mattered largely because a number of countries were still on the gold standard, and were keeping interest rates well above the zero lower bound in an attempt to preserve their gold reserves. Devaluation relaxed this constraint by making the gold worth more in domestic currency, and hence was expansionary.Today there’s nothing like that, and rates are pretty much at zero. And in that case, it’s hard to see what mutual intervention accomplishes. Suppose the Fed buys a bunch of euros, and the ECB a bunch of dollars. Suppose also that they do the usual thing and hold the newly acquired reserves in short-term debt — Treasury bills. Then the net effect is just as if each central bank had done a conventional open-market operation in its own T-bills.
And the whole point of the liquidity trap literature is that such conventional open-market operations have no effect — they just swap one zero-rate asset, monetary base, for another, short-term government debt. So the currency interventions accomplish nothing.
It would be different if the central banks acquired long-term assets instead; then we’re talking about quantitative easing through the back door. But I see no reason to believe that central banks reluctant to buy domestic long-term debt will be more willing to buy foreign long-term debt.
So a wave of mutual currency purchases would be harmless but also pointless.
Publicado em Forex, News | 
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