“Forget Tariffs. Here’s a better way to close the trade gap.” That’s the title of an article in Barron’s by Matthew Klein in which he argues in favour of a proposal by Senators Tammy Baldwin and Josh Hawley to require the Federal Reserve to keep the current account balanced around zero over 5-year periods. For the record, the US current account has been in deficit on average, by just over 2% GDP since the end the Bretton Woods era.
The view behind the Baldwin-Hawley Bill is that the US current account deficit is a product of Americans consistently spending more than they earn, not because of profligacy on their part but because of foreigners consuming less than they produce (and saving as a result), dumping the excess into the US market and displacing US output (and jobs, and income). These over-saving foreigners enthusiastically reinvest the money they earn back into the US and the upshot is that the dollar has been consistently overvalued. Mr Klein cites Joe Gagnon, a former Fed economist who now works for the Peterson Institute, observing that “The dollar tends to fluctuate between being too high and being about right, but it has never been too low”.
That’s an interesting statement, though it requires a caveat because what a currency being ‘too high’ means is up for interpretation. Broadly, there are two ways of looking at it, which come to different conclusions. The first is ‘PPP’-style valuation, which measures relative prices. That’s the valuation which matters if you’re tapping away on a keyboard by a swimming pool in a foreign country before heading out to dinner. The second is to look at where exchange rates are relative to a fundamental equilibrium that would be consistent with the current account being in balance (along with the rest of the economy) over the medium term.
On a PPP basis, the dollar has been a bit more than 10% overvalued on average over the last 20 years against the currencies of its top five trading counterparts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the currency which has been, on average, most undervalued on a PPP basis against the dollar is the Chinese yuan. Today, the dollar is not only overvalued against all that group (yen euro, yuan, Mexican peso and Canadian dollar), but the only major currencies which are overvalued relative to the dollar are the Swiss franc and Norwegian krone, which are pretty much always overvalued on PPP.
Fair enough: on the basis of PPP, the dollar is unambiguously overvalued today. It’s a very expensive foreign holiday destination, especially if you’re British! On the other hand, back on 2011, when the Brazilian Finance Minister was complaining about currency wars and the dollar was anchored by QE, the dollar was undervalued against all the major currencies except for the Turkish Lira, Korean won and Mexican peso.
The most-accepted alternative measure of valuation is FEER, which looks at how much a country’s real effective exchange rate needs to adjust to be consistent with medium-term balance. In June the IMF conducted its 2018 External Balance Assessment and concluded that the dollar was 8% overvalued at the end of last year. It’s worth noting that the euro is also overvalued on this measure, by 6% (because the current account surplus is entirely due to the weakness of the economy, rather than the valuation of the currency). The most undervalued currencies, according to the IMF, were the Japanese yen, Malaysian ringgit, Turkish lira and Mexican peso. The Chinese yuan is about right and among the G10 currencies, Sterling and Swedish krona stand out as being undervalued.
The IMF hadn’t stated doing its external balance assessment back in 2011, when the dollar reached its post 2000 low. However, the Peterson Institute, where Mr Gagnon works, didn’t just make one assessment that year, it made two - in April and November (the dollar’s low was in July). And indeed, they concluded that the dollar was overvalued by 8 ½% in April, and 9.3% in REER terms in November. On which basis, it was still nearly 8% overvalued at its low point. The PIIE position therefore, might reasonable reflect Mr Gagnon’s that the dollar is sometimes overvalued, sometimes fairly valued but never undervalued – at least on a FEER basis. The yuan was 16% undervalued in 2011 meanwhile, and al the Asian ‘Tiger’ economies had very undervalued currencies. The euro was fairly valued (when EUR/USD was around 1.40).
The easy conclusion is that however we look at it, the dollar is overvalued now. And that is the view of the US administration, alongside anyone who thinks the US current account deficit is a product of foreigners ‘dumping’ their exports in the US at the expense of American workers.
I’m instinctively wary of that argument. Apart from anything, any argument that says the Swiss franc is undervalued fails to pass the common-sense test. In particular though, pinning all the blame for the US current account deficit on foreign rather than US behaviour, seems nearly as unfair as blaming everyone else for the UK’s (even larger) current account deficit. The US’ position in the global financial system means that, to varying degrees, we all import US monetary policy and that suits the US just fine when the dollar is cheaper (or less overvalued, if you will) but after the rest of the world was bludgeoned into boosting demand as the US ran very accommodative fiscal policy under President Reagan, and even when the dollar lost half its value between the 1985 peak and the end of the decade, the US still barley got the current account back into balance. The patsies then were the Japanese who embarked on policies to boost domestic demand that ended up with housing and equity bubbles, the hangover from which we call ‘Japanification’. Maybe it was all worth it to ‘win’ the Cold War, but the strong dollar of the mid 1980s was a product of US fiscal and monetary policy far, far more than it was the result of anything that anyone else was doing.
From a policy perspective, the US solution to its problem is the same as the one facing others when they find their exchange rates in the wrong place because of US policy. Global interest rates and bond yields are correlated and the US, because it has enjoyed stronger growth than other major economies, has higher rates and higher yields than others too. And so it has a strong currency. This is exacerbated by easy fiscal policy. If the US wants a weaker dollar (and a smaller current account deficits, for that matter) it needs tighter fiscal policy and easier Fed policy, dragging US yields down to everyone else’s levels. If it wants to run domestic policies with no regard for anyone else, as it has always done, it may find out that like everyone else, it can’t go on doing that for ever. And if we find out that the US economic out-performance is unsustainable in a joined-up global economy (one that is suffering from a trade downturn as well as self-inflicted harm in the UK and the Eurozone) then we may indeed find that the next trough in US rates and yields is lower than the last one and not that dissimilar to what other major economies are already seeing.
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