FROM COVID TO CURRENCY CRISIS?

One hallmark of the United States’ superpower status is the primacy of the dollar. All regimes rise and fall. There are reasons to believe the US dollar is at risk of losing its status. How likely is this, why, and what might follow?

There are several ways to measure dollar primacy.

First, the US dollar accounts for 62 percent of global central bank reserves, according to the International Monetary Fund. The euro is about 20 percent, and the Chinese yuan 1.9 percent.

Second, in payments, the dollar accounts for 40 percent of cross-border transactions intermediated by SWIFT, a global messaging system for corresponding banking. The yuan: under 2 percent.

Third, in foreign-exchange markets, the dollar is on one side of about 90% of swaps.

And fourth, US Treasuries are considered the ultimate safe haven, which is why foreigners hold nearly $7 trillion of them.

Dollar primacy made sense in the 1940s when the Bretton Woods arrangement cemented its reserve status. The US economy accounted for more than 50 percent of global output, with Europe and Asia devastated by war.

Jame DiBiasio

Today the US accounts for around 15 percent of global GDP. China now accounts for around 18 percent, in purchasing-power parity terms (although the US economy is still larger in nominal terms). The vast discrepancy for the US and China between their economic positions and the influence of their currencies is stark.

Economic prowess is not the sole determinant of a currency’s power, although it suggests long-term directions. The US outpaced Britain as the world’s biggest economy in 1871 but it would take seventy years before the dollar displaced sterling as the leading currency.

Moreover, the tussle between the dollar and the pound was not straightforward. Late nineteenth century America was powered by its farms and factories, but financially it was immature, its banking system haphazard. American merchants had to conduct foreign trade in sterling, not dollars.

London had been the world’s financial center, with the pound at the heart of its money markets, since the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. Despite Britain’s relative economic decline, the gold-backed pound was a reliable, trusted system – an example of the network effect, made valuable by the sheer number of institutions using it.

The dollar only began to compete when the US established the Federal Reserve in 1913, bringing some stability to its banking system. In the 1920s the dollar became a reserve currency on par with sterling, but the Fed botched the 1929 Wall Street crash and the dollar slipped. Only after the devastation of World War II did the dollar triumph. Even then it remained tied to gold, until Richard Nixon floated the currency in 1971.

Since then we have lived in a world of fiat money, money that is based on the power and prestige of government rather than any intrinsic value.

That time also marks the appearance of electronic financial networks.

Techno-capitalism, cheered on by the Reagan-Thatcher model of government, has driven globalization and free capital flows. Since Nixon’s time, America has also supported the rise of China, as part of its overall promotion of free trade and open markets. This US support was initially to counter the Soviet Union but in the 1990s, buoyed by the end of the Cold War and US corporations’ eagerness to outsource labor to China, the pro-engagement argument took on a life of its own.

As America exported jobs it also exported dollars. It fended off challenges from the yen in the 1980s and the euro from 1998. And the US remained blind to the instability of laissez-faire capital flows because the growing list of crises – Latin America, Japan, East Asia, Russia – was “over there”. Domestic problems were viewed as scandals, the accounting frauds of a few bad apples, rather than symptoms of a broader problem.

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and its sequel in the eurozone, nearly destroyed the status quo. Even China had to respond to the economic fallout by pumping its economy with credit. But in the US, although the banking system was stabilized, the response was not the sort of austerity demanded of emerging markets. Instead the Fed slashed interest rates and began purchasing Treasuries and other securities, to bring even long-term rates as low as possible.

Japan had been doing this sort of thing for decades, and the eurozone followed suit. The developed world has abandoned laissez-faire in its capital markets, a trend exacerbated by reckless corporate tax cuts made by US Republicans in 2018.

By now, however, China had clocked three decades of heady growth. A cheap and skilled workforce combined with good infrastructure made China the workshop of the world. Its vast middle class hinted at a giant consumer economy in the making.

China’s monetary policy is however immature. It maintains a managed peg to the dollar, along with the rest of Asia (except Japan). China has been a huge importer of direct investment but not financial flows. On the contrary, China has been a vast exporter of capital – it’s a major buyer of US Treasuries – despite its hunger for financing its growth. China has preferred to finance this growth through forced savings among its financial institutions (and therefore its people).

Since the 2000s, Chinese leaders have attempted to rebalance the economy by reducing debt-funded infrastructure and real-estate spending (which support its exports) and growing a domestic consumer market. These attempts always crash into the Communist Party’s insistence on controlling all levers of power and bolstering the privileges of state-owned enterprises over the private sector.

Although both the US and China pursue flawed policies, the status quo might have continued for a long time, but the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated their respective paths.

China responded with a brutal but effective lockdown. The West has unleashed record borrowing to try to salvage its economies. The Federal Reserve has expanded its securities purchases to levels that were unimaginable even during the scariest moments of the GFC.

This raises the question of the sustainability of the currency regime. China and other holders of US Treasuries are now earning almost zero yields. Given America’s future liabilities (pension and healthcare costs), its handling of the GFC shows that it is almost certain to continue to borrow rather than cut spending or raise taxes.

Such spending can be a net benefit if it supports economic growth. If the US invests in, say, its infrastructure and education system, it would be laying the groundwork for long-term prosperity. This may yet happen, but even so, Treasury holders are looking at a grim forecast.

Central banks and global investors will seek alternatives. The yuan is starting to look more attractive. China has its macro problems. But it is the only major economy running a conventional monetary policy, which is to say it is paying investors a yield. Chinese stocks and bonds are now part of global investment indexes. Even as the Trump administration attempts to freeze China out of the global economy, US money managers and banks are making a beeline to participate in China’s financial markets.

The network effect and the sheer weight of Wall Street will keep the dollar dominant for some time. China must still earn investors’ trust. Its introduction of a digital yuan, however, will make transacting the currency much easier. China is laying the groundwork for a new financial system, based on technologies such as blockchain, that may well come to challenge the status quo, starting in emerging markets.

Just as the US in the 1910s undertook the reforms to create a credible financial system, China is trying to do something similar today. It has a long way to go and it faces internal political contradictions (comparable to Japan’s challenges in the 1980s). The US could also reform its monetary and fiscal policies, breathing new life into the dollar regime.

We are probably entering a phase of competition between the dollar and the yuan, and there is no predetermined outcome. America may not get to enjoy the luxury of a gradual transition, though: just as the Suez Crisis of 1956 destroyed British pretensions about the pound, an escalation of the US-Sino conflict could have a similar effect.

The irony is that the biggest winners from a healthy rebalancing among currencies would be ordinary Americans. Dollar primacy benefits Washington, which increasingly relies on the world’s dependence on the dollar as a tool to impose punishments on its enemies. And it benefits Wall Street, the heart of the American dollar export machine. But this arrangement means more debt at home and more jobs sent abroad.

For America to invest in itself it must make it unattractive for its own companies and financiers to send dollars overseas. It can try to do so of its own volition – or risk being forced.

 

Cowries to Crypto: The History of Money, Currency and Wealth by Jame DiBiasio and illustrated by Harry Harrison is published by OANDA, a global leader in online multi-asset trading services. It will be available from 1 September on amazon.co.uk, priced at £19.99.

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