Currency Wars: What do effective exchange rates tell us?

In November, South Korea joined the ranks of countries striving to limit the upwards pressure on their currency when two lawmakers submitted a parliamentary proposal to impose various taxes on foreign capital inflows and outflows. If any of these measures pushes through, South Korea would become the first (traditionally financially liberalised) OECD country to reinstate capital controls. This brings the list of countries intervening directly, indirectly or considering intervention to more than 23. This is an unwelcome and disturbing, but hardly surprising, development: as policy rates in the US are at near-zero levels and monetary policy is geared towards managing the yield curve in order to meet domestic objectives, emerging countries throughout the world are scrambling to protect themselves from the negative spillovers in the form of massive capital inflows...

A Concise History of Exchange Rate Regimes in Latin America

This paper analyzes the experience of the major Latin American countries including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Peru and others in the post-World-War period, up to the crisis caused by the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble. The authors provide a detailed historical analysis that takes into account the most important economic events that helped determine exchange rate policy, and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the various exchange rate regimes, and their impact on outcomes including economic growth and inflation.capital controls, capital flows

Exchange Rates and Fundamentals

We show analytically that in a rational expectations present value model, an asset price manifests near random walk behavior if fundamentals are I(1) and the factor for discounting future fundamentals is near one. We argue that this result helps explain the well known puzzle that fundamental variables such as relative money supplies, outputs, inflation and interest rates provide little help in predicting changes in floating exchange rates. As well, we show that the data do exhibit a related link suggested by standard models - that the exchange rate helps predict these fundamentals. The implication is that exchange rates and fundamentals are linked in a way that is broadly consistent with asset pricing models of the exchange rate.

Flexible Exchange Rates and Interdependence

The paper was prepared for the NBER-IMF conference on Exchange Rate Policy and Interdependence. It reviews the experience with flexible exchange rates and the main policy alternatives that have been suggested. The theoretical part develops a modern open economy macro model with an emphasis on capital mobility, real and nominal wage stickiness and expectations. The impact of disturbances is discussed in terms of the underlying structure, in particular, the relative role of real and nominal inflexibility. Among the main policy alternatives the paper reviews the McKinnon proposal for world monetarism, and the band proposal. Both of these schemes are found unsatisfactory in coping with the chief problem of the current systems namely how to cope with the transition to low inflation. The alternative of capital controls, likewise, would not avoid the adverse consequences of monetary stabilization it would only influence the particular details of the international transmission.