1、1Keynes, Global Imbalances, and International Monetary Reform, Today凯恩斯、全球失衡与当今国际货币体系改革Robert Skidelsky and Vijay Joshi罗伯特斯基德尔斯基 维杰乔希Rebalancing the Global Economy: A Primer启蒙书/雷管/底漆/引线 for Policymaking by Stijn Claessens, Simon Evenett and Bernard Hoekman (eds) | Wednesday, June 23, 2010 This chapt
2、er argues that the Keynes Plan of 1941 for dealing with the trade imbalances of his time is highly relevant to the problem of East Asian-US imbalances today. Just as the first Bretton Woods system rested on a “grand bargain” between the US and Britain, a new Bretton Woods would test the statesmanshi
3、p of the US and China.The Problem of Global ImbalancesAs the world tentatively scrambles快速爬行/匍匐前进/攀登 out of the worst recession since World War II, the future of the world monetary system remains firmly off the agenda. The global downturn had many interacting causes, but a tenable 站得住脚的；合理的 view is
4、that the accumulation of reserves by a handful of countries in East Asia and the Middle East played a key permissive role in the collapse. Between 2003 and 2009 (measurable) global reserves increased from $2.6 trillion to $6.8 trillion an average annual rate of increase of about 15%, at a time when
5、global GDP grew at an annual rate of 4.4%. This amounted to a big increase in deflationary pressure. However, the fact that the reserves were held mainly in dollars allowed the US to avoid deflation, and instead run a “Keynesian” domestic policy which set the stage for an unsustainable asset and con
6、sumption boom. In short, there was a nexus connecting reserve accumulation by China and expansionary monetary and fiscal policy in the US. The purpose of this chapter is to how that the Keynes Plan of 1941 for dealing with the trade imbalances of his time is highly relevant to the problem of East As
7、ian-US imbalances today. It proposes two mechanisms for alleviating the current problem of “symmetrical non-adjustment”. The first part of the essay will examine the historical context of the Keynes Plan and the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system; the second will analyse the present problem of no
8、n-adjustment and steps which can be taken to overcome it.The Keynes Plan of 1941In the 1920s Keynes had come to see deflation as the main cause of British unemployment; and the main source of deflationary pressure as the unbalanced creditor position of the US. In theory, the international gold stand
9、ard, which was the currency regime of the time provided for automatic and symmetrical adjustment of current account imbalances. Prices would automatically rise in the gold gaining countries and would automatically fall in the gold-losing countries, thus restoring the 2equilibrium of exports and impo
10、rts between the two. But Keynes had come to realise, as he put it in 1941, that adjustment was “compulsory for the debtor and voluntary for the creditor”. If the creditor does not choose to make, or allow, his share of the adjustment, he suffers no inconvenience: while a countrys reserve cannot fall
11、 below zero, there is no ceiling which sets an upper limit. The same is true if private capital flows are the means of adjustment. “The debtor must borrow; the creditor is under nocompulsion to lend”.During the Great Depression itself, creditor “hoarding” had been aggravated by the flight of capital
12、 from deficit to surplus countries. Following the financial crisis of 1931, the gold standard collapsed, the international capital market seized upto stop being able to move or work in the normal way 无法转动/故障 , and the major countries resorted to tariffs, competitive devaluations, and bilateral trade
13、 agreements to balance their accounts. The international payments system created in the 19th century ceased to function.Keynes Clearing Union plan of 1941 was designed to avoid a repetition of this disaster. It would retain the advantages (as he saw them) of a fixed exchange rate system while avoidi
14、ng the asymmetric costs of adjustment. The essential feature of his plan was that creditor countries would not be allowed to sterilise their surpluses, or charge punitive rates of interest for lending them out; rather these surpluses would be automatically available as cheap overdraft【透资】 facilities
15、 to debtors through the mechanism of an international clearing bank whose depositors were the central banks of the union.All residual international transactions those giving rise to surpluses and deficits were to be settled through “clearing accounts” held by member central banks in an International
16、 Clearing Bank1 (ICB). Member banks could buy foreign currencies and sell their own against debits and credits to their accounts at the ICB (denominated in bank money or “bancor”) up to an “index quota” equal to half the average value of their countrys international trade over the previous five year
17、s. Deposits of bank money (credits and debits) would be created by surpluses and deficits and extinguished by their liquidation. Each national currency would have a fixed but adjustable relation to a unit of bank money (bancor) which itself had a fixed relationship to gold. But though bancor could b
18、e obtained for gold, it was not convertible into gold. Keynes long term aim was to de-monetise gold and make bancor the ultimate reserve asset of the system. By increasing or reducing the total of quotas, the Banks managers would be able to vary the supply of bancor contra-cyclically.Keynes sought t
19、o secure creditor adjustment without renouncing debtor discipline. To this end his scheme aimed to bring a simultaneous pressure on both surplus and deficit countries to “clear” their accounts. Persistent creditor countries would be allowed or required to revalue their currencies, unblock any foreig
20、n-owned investments, and be charged rising rates of interest (up to 10 per cent) on credits running above a quarter of their quota. Any credit balances exceeding quotas at the end of a year would be confiscated and transferred to a Reserve Fund. Persistent deficit countries would be allowed or requi
21、red to depreciate their currencies, to sell the ICB any free gold, and 1 Clearing Bank: a bank which exchanges cheques with other banks through a central organization called a clearing house 。本处应译为 “国际交换清算银行”，以区别于 Bank of International Settlement 之中译“国际清算银行”(BIS).3prohibit capital exports. They woul
22、d also be charged interest on excessive debits. If all countries were in perfect balance at the years end, the sum of bancor balances would be exactly zero.The Keynes plan was vetoed by the US, which was not prepared to allow its “hard earned” surpluses to be automatically at the disposal of “profli
23、gate”挥霍的，放荡的 debtor countries. Instead the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 set up an International Monetary Fund to provide short-term financial assistance for countries in temporary balance of payments difficulties. The IMF was a fund, not a bank, into which members would pay contributions or quota
24、s made up of gold and domestic currencies. (The total resources of the Fund were set at $8bn, as opposed to $25bn. for Keynes ICB). The Fund would supply foreign currencies to members up to the limit of their quotas, provided they corrected their domestic policies. Par values of currencies would be
25、fixed in terms of gold, which could be altered only to correct a “fundamental disequilibrium”. Both the Keynes Plan and the IMF system relied on capital controls to prevent the destabilising flows of “hot money”.The crucial point was that, while accepting the idea of fixed, but adjustable exchange r
26、ates, the Fund provided no mechanism to stop persistent reserve accumulation. It upheld支持，维持，赞同，确认, that is, the orthodox doctrine of debtor adjustment, and to that extent failed to solve the Keynes problem of persistent creditor hoarding. The contrast between the two plans was deliberate. For Keyne
27、s and the British, the problem which brought down the gold standard in 1931 had arisen from the refusal of the surplus countries to spend their surpluses; for the Americans it had arisen from the monetary indiscipline of the deficit countries.The Bretton Woods system in practiceThat the Bretton Wood
28、s fixed exchange rate system, which lasted from 1949 to 1971, did not reproduce the deflationary character of the inter-war system, was due to the general commitment of governments to full employment policies backed by the “dishoarding” policies of the US. America flooded the “free” world with dolla
29、rs, to such an extent that by the late 1960s it was starting to run a balance of trade deficit itself. The boot was now on the other foot, but the need for the deficit country (now the USA) to deflate was circumvented by the role of the dollar as the worlds main reserve asset. As its trade deficit w
30、idened, the USA printed an increasing quantity of dollars to cover its unrequited单方面的，单相思的 imports. The surplus countries accumulated American dollar liabilities which they invested in US Treasury bonds. The US did not have to restrict domestic credit by raising interest rates since the dollars it p
31、rinted came back to it. In the absence of what would have been a major deflationary force, the world economy boomed for twenty years.The flaw in the system, as pointed out by Professor Triffin of Yale University, was that the increase in the liabilities of the key-currency country was bound to raise
32、 doubts about its ability to redeem these liabilities in gold. At the end of the 1960s, the French started converting their dollar reserves into gold. This brought about the predicted collapse of the gold-exchange standard in 1971. The dollar became inconvertible. A new supplementary international r
33、eserve currency, Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), had been set up, but since there was no mechanism for converting 4dollar balances into SDRs, the dollar continued to be the worlds main reserve asset in a mixed world of floating, fixed, and managed exchange rates.In theory, floating exchange rates rem
34、ove the need for any reserves at all, since balance of payments deficits and surpluses would not arise. But the need for reserves unexpectedly survived, mainly to guard against speculative movements of hot money which could drive exchange rates away from their equilibrium values. This happened throu
35、ghout the 1980s. Starting in the late 1990s, after the East Asian Crisis, East Asian governments unilaterally erected a “Bretton Woods II”, linking their currencies to the dollar, and holding their reserves in dollars. This reproduced the expansionary benefits of Bretton Woods I, but at the cost of
36、an increasingly unbalanced reserve position, as the dollar became progressively overvalued against the super-competitive renminbi.Todays problem of current account imbalances reproduces the problems which brought down both the old gold standard and its successor Bretton Woods system. The gold standa
37、rd failed to provide for the symmetric adjustment of surpluses and deficits. The Keynes Plan was designed to replace asymmetric adjustment which brought deflation to the deficit countries by deliberate provision for symmetric adjustment through the International Clearing Union. The Bretton Woods sys
38、tem did not solve the Keynes problem. It upheld the orthodox doctrine of debtor adjustment, but, through the IMF, gave debtor countries time to “put their houses in order”to organize something well；摆放井然/to solve problems. The deflationary pressure against which the Keynes plan was directed was solve
39、d not by the mechanisms he had envisaged, but by the voluntary “dishoarding” of its surpluses by the US. But this called into question the credibility of its promise to redeem dollars for gold. Todays system can be characterised as one of symmetric non-adjustment: as long as the surplus-earning coun
40、tries are content to hold their accumulating reserves in dollars, neither side is under any pressure to adjust.However, the main issue today is no longer the “sustainability of the deficit”, but its effect on the economies of both surplus and deficit countries. A sequence of financial booms and bust
41、s is built into a system which brings no pressure for adjustment to bear on either creditors or the principal debtor (the U.S.). This is both irrational and costly. Unless steps are taken to re-balance global current accounts, we will be walking into the next crisis. To secure the automatic adjustme
42、nt of current account surpluses and deficits was the object of the Keynes Plan of 1941. This should be the starting point of contemporary efforts to rebalance the worlds money.The present non-systemAs we have suggested, global imbalances played a part in causing the severe credit crunch of 2008-92.
43、But they are also dangerous per seby or of itself. They can lead to disorderly reversals triggered by large capital movements; and they can also provoke trade restrictions. It is a fair betto be something which is likely to happen that a continuation of the global imbalances of 2006 would have led t
44、o a dollar crisis or a protectionist frenzy3 if the credit bubble had not implodedfail suddenly and completely and be unable to operate first. The imbalances have now decreased but could open up 2 a period of economic difficulty when it is difficult to borrow money from banks.3 uncontrolled and exci
45、ted behaviour or emotion, which is sometimes violent.5again when the world economy recovers. They thus continue to be a serious potential problem.Todays circumstances are different from Keynes day. Capital mobility is now much greater. We do not have adjustably- pegged exchange rates. Indeed, there
46、is now nothing that can be called an exchange rate “system”. There is instead a wide diversity of exchange rate regimes. The reserve system is also different. It is centred on the dollar, not on gold. Today the dollar is the principal reserve currency, with the euro in second place but far behind. T
47、here also exists a fiduciary international central-bank money, the SDR, created in the late 1960s, but so far of minor quantitative importance. But despite the changed environment, Keynes insights, encapsulatedto express or show the most important facts about something in his Clearing Union proposal
48、s, are still highly relevant to avoiding future imbalances.A necessary requirement of smooth international adjustment is a well-functioning mechanism for changing real exchange rates. That does not currently exist. Many major countries are floating but some (notably China) are not. Nonfloaters who r
49、un balance of payments surpluses are able to block real exchange rate changes by sterilising their reserves. International adjustment also ideally requires some international coordination of macroeconomic policies, at least sporadically. This requirement is conspicuous by its absence4. (The cooperative demand stimulus in 2008/9 was an exception.) The absence of a satisfactory adjustment mechanism has resulted in the revival of the asymmetry strongly emphasised by Keynes. Adjustment pressures are concentrated on the deficit countries (unles
