International Relations

I recently visited Algeria and Morocco.  Like so many other developing countries, they are dealing with the sharp decline in global commodity prices that has taken place over the last few years.  In meetings in Algiers and Casablanca, I offered four concrete ideas for policies to help commodity-exporting countries deal with global price volatility.  The four proposals, very briefly, are: (1) hedging with options (as Mexico does), (2) commodity bonds, (3) countercyclical fiscal institutions (like Chile’s), and (4) central bank targeting of a currency-plus-commodity basket.

As the G-7 Leaders gather in Ise-Shima, Japan, on May 26-27, the still fragile global economy is on their minds.  They would like a road map to address stagnant growth. Their approach should be to talk less about currency wars and more about fiscal policy.Fiscal policy vs. monetary policyUnder the conditions that have prevailed in most major countries over the last ten years, we have reason to think that fiscal policy is a more powerful tool for affecting the level of economic activity, as compared to monetary policy.

WASHINGTON, DC – Trade is high on the agenda in the United States, Europe, and much of Asia this year. In the US, where concern has been heightened by weak recent trade numbers, President Barack Obama is pushing for Congress to give him Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), previously known as fast-track authority, to conclude the mega-regional Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with 11 Asian and Latin American countries. Without TPA, trading partners refrain from offering their best concessions, correctly fearing that Congress would seek to take “another bite of the apple” when asked to ratify any deal.

Trade is now high on the agenda in Washington. President Obama is pushing hard for Congress to give him Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), once known as fast-track authority.  He intends to use it to complete negotiations with 11 trading partners under the Trans Pacific Partnership.  A majority of trade-skeptical Democrats in Congress have lined up on the wrong side on this one, along with some Tea Party Republicans who automatically oppose anything that Obama is in favor of.Without TPA, trading partners hold back from offering their best concessions to the president’s trade representative in negotiations, fearing correctly that Congress would seek to take “another bite of the apple” when the White House brought the agreement to them for ratification.

The possibility of devaluation is apparently an issue in the upcoming Argentine elections.  (The forward rate for next year is about 13 pesos per dollar, which is close to the informal rate and suggests a big  devaluation relative to the current official exchange rate of 8.)   In this connection, an Argentine newspaper has asked me about “Contractionary Currency Crashes,” a paper that I presented as the 5th Mundell-Fleming Lecture of the  IMF’s Annual Research Conference. 1) Do you think the conclusions about the connections between devaluation and elections are still valid in 2015 even though your article was published in 2005?My most relevant finding was that political leaders had historically been twice as likely to lose office in the six months following a big devaluation as otherwise.

CAMBRIDGE – As the Federal Reserve moves closer to initiating one of the most long-awaited and widely predicted periods of rising short-term interest rates in the United States, many are asking how emerging markets will be affected. Indeed, the question has been asked at least since May 2013, when then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke famously announced that quantitative easing would be “tapered” later that year, causing long-term US interest rates to rise and prompting a reversal of capital flows to emerging markets.

We are at the 30th anniversary of the 1985 Plaza Accord.  It was the most dramatic intervention in the foreign exchange market since Nixon originally floated the US currency.   At the end of February 1985 the dollar reached dizzying heights, which remain a record to this day.  Then it began a long depreciation, encouraged by a shift in policy under the new Treasury Secretary, James Baker, and pushed down by G-5 foreign exchange intervention.  People remember only the September 1985 meeting at the Plaza Hotel in New York City that ratified the policy shift; so celebrations of the 30th anniversary will wait until this coming fall.

CAMBRIDGE – What a difference two months make. When the Republican Party scored strong gains in last November’s US congressional elections, the universally accepted explanation was that voters were expressing their frustration with disappointing economic performance. Indeed, when Americans went to the polls, a substantial share thought that economic conditions were deteriorating; many held President Barack Obama responsible and voted against his Democratic Party.Now, suddenly, everyone has discovered that the US economy is doing well – so well that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has switched from blaming Obama for a bad economy to demanding credit for a good one.

On December 3, 2014, I participated in a panel of Harvard University’s Bipartisan  Program  for  Newly Elected Members of Congress.   After establishing that the median US household has not shared in recent strong economic gains, I went on to consider policy remedies.I offered the Congressmen eight policy recommendations.  Some will sound popular, some very unpopular; some associated with “liberals”, some with “conservatives.”   I would claim that they all have in common heavy support from economists, regardless of party – even the very unpopular ones.

Those worried about the future of the earth’s climate are hoping that this year’s climate change convention in Lima, Peru, December 2014, will yield progress toward specific national commitments, looking ahead to an international agreement at the make-or-break Paris meeting to take place in December 2015.The precedent of the Kyoto Protocol negotiated in 1997 is more discouraging than encouraging. It was an encouraging precedent in that countries were politically able to agree on legally binding quantitative limits to their emissions of Greenhouse Gases, to be achieved with the aid of international trading and other market mechanisms.