Forbes columnist extraordinaire Peter Ferrara was once kind enough to call my own Econoclasts “a brilliant, overlooked book.” I know another brilliant book that wasn’t overlooked when it came out last year (it was a bestseller), James Rickards’s Currency Wars, but it sure could do with a dose of renewed publicity and attention about now.
So I was slipping into Currency Wars last week when I was jerked alert by the following sequence:
At the heart of every currency war is a paradox. While currency wars are fought internationally, they are driven by domestic distress. Currency wars begin in an atmosphere of insufficient internal growth.
And in particular by this:
The country that starts down this road typically finds itself with high unemployment, low or declining growth, a weak banking sector and deteriorating public finances. In these circumstances it is difficult to generate growth through purely internal means and the promotion of exports through a devalued currency becomes the growth engine of last resort.
Here let it be clear that Rickards is making an inventory of the general conditions, over the years, that have brought about attempts by countries to rescue their sad economies by forcing foreigners to buy their products. But doesn’t it sound exactly like an inventory of the American condition three-and-a-half years into President Obama? “The country…typically finds itself with high unemployment, low or declining growth, a weak banking sector and deteriorating public finances.”
Check, check, check, and check in the U.S., Fall 2012.
And what is official economic policy in this context, but a huge new play by the Federal Reserve to cheapen the dollar (“QE 3”) coupled with a race to the bottom on the part of the president and his Republican challenger to hit a big trading partner (China) with penalties.
The idea is that if all the spending and regulation of the last few years has only resulted in nil growth, stubborn unemployment, whopping budget deficits, and a banking sector nobody believes in, at last increase American jobs and wages through…exports. If the dollar goes down against the major currencies, exports will go up, the logic goes, and same thing if the trade “penalties” get their desired effect.
In other words, the Fed and the president are now outsourcing—yes, that word— to the rest of the world the burden of getting the domestic American economy recovered. But of course the world has asked for no such thing. A binge of U.S. exports would be reflected in foreign places by money flowing out-of-country to the U.S. and concomitant declines in employment. We’re talking about places like China and especially Europe having to transfer some of their currently distressed living standards to the American people, all because Obamanomics and the earlier Fed feats turned out to be a failure.
“Currency war” is the term Rickards uses to describe this sort of gamesmanship, which obviously can be played most effectively by powerful counties and at the expense of the less powerful. The president’s supporters have made much of Obama’s foreign policy “reset” with Russia, Europe, Iraq, and the Arab world, and the man won the Nobel Peace Prize, but sure enough he is now embarking on one of the most classic ploys to force the world at its own expense to support the American lifestyle.
Of course there’s official denial all over the place. But a big secret like this one is hard to keep. Rickards has fun with the slips that have come from the administration. He quotes the Fed vice-chair Janet Yellen (Obama’s appointee) referring to quantitative easing two years ago: “The purpose…is not to push the dollar down. This should not be regarded as some sort of chapter in a currency war.”
But once loosed from her appointment as Obama’s economics chair, Christina Romer said soon after: “Quantitative easing also works through exchange rates…The Fed could engage in much more thorough quantitative easing…to further lower…the dollar.”
OK, so it’s a currency war, one now really jacked up with QE 3 and the tough trade talk. Sometimes, Rickards is keen to point out, currency wars yield to shooting ones. For all our domestic woe these years of the Great Recession, the full potential wages of the failure of Obamanomics are only now beginning to come into focus.
James Rickard’s Currency Wars can be found at The Imaginative Conservatives Bookstore. Originally published at Forbes.com the essay is reprinted here with gracious permission of Brian Domitrovic.
I do not support Obama or his policies. However, giving him his due, all the conditions you outline (high unemployment, declining growth, weak banking sector, deteriorating public finances) existed the day he took office. The bursting of the housing bubble that caused them was itself caused in part by a loose "money supply" from the Fed starting nearly 2 decades ago. It seems the Fed views a loose money supply as the solution for all problems — growing an economy (mid/late90's, mid '00's) as well as addressing the consequences of the bursting of bubbles its loose money supply has helped create (dot-com in 2000, and housing in 2008).
As for currency wars, would you comment on how China has for years/decades pegged its currency below what its market value would be to accomplish the same ends as you believe the Fed sought to do with QE1,2 & 3? If deflating the USD is not the answer, what do you think the US's response should be to that?
"A binge of U.S. exports would be reflected in foreign places by money flowing out-of-country to the U.S. and concomitant declines in employment. We’re talking about places like China and especially Europe having to transfer some of their currently distressed living standards to the American people…."
So the US is in danger of going on "a binge" of exporting goods? Just what goods exactly would we be speaking of here? For years now all Americans have seen is a binge of imports especially from China.
The economist Wilhelm Ropke was a man of balanced conservative temperament who wrote in his book Economics of the Free Society after warning of those who seek to curb imports merely for their own economic interests, "To this we may add that the importation of cheap goods, though generally advantageous at present, can have a paralyzing influence on the future development of domestic production or can lead to costly dislocations to which it would be undesirable to see the domestic economy exposed."
We are long passed that "costly dislocations" threshold in the US Mr. Domitrovic. You'll have to excuse we Americans if we show concern over the "distressed living standards" here in the US.