Time for a Sterling Crisis?

The UK pound plunged again earlier this month:

two dates are marked with vertical lines: the the Brexit vote (red line) and the Prime Minister's speech signalling that the most likely outcome was a "hard Brexit" (green line) where the UK leaves the European single market (i.e., that it won't become part of the European Economic Area, like Finland* Norway, or negotiate an arrangement like Switzerland's).

Departure from the EU and the single market make the UK a less attractive location for foreign investment (see, e.g., comments from Nissan's CEO about its Sunderland plant).  A decrease in demand for UK assets implies a drop in the pound.  The UK is also a less attractive location for domestic investment now as well, and the situation is probably not a good one for consumer confidence - a reduction in demand due to lower desired consumption and investment would imply lower interest rates, which also would cause the pound to fall.

Is this yet another "sterling crisis"?  Not in the usual sense - as Gavyn Davies notes, there is no fixed exchange rate to defend this time, and most of the UK's external debt is denominated in pounds.

As Paul Krugman explains, a fall in the pound is a part of the adjustment process.  He writes:

But it’s important to be aware that not everyone in Britain is equally affected. Pre-Brexit, Britain was obviously experiencing a version of the so-called Dutch disease. In its traditional form, this referred to the way natural resource exports crowd out manufacturing by keeping the currency strong. In the UK case, the City’s financial exports play the same role. So their weakening helps British manufacturing – and, maybe, the incomes of people who live far from the City and still depend directly or indirectly on manufacturing for their incomes.

However, a rebalancing of the UK economy in favor of manufacturing exports will not come quickly, according to Barry Eichengreen (Robert Skidelsky goes further and argues for helping the process along through "import substitution" policies).

One likely consequence is inflation, as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes.  Prices of imported goods will rise significantly (though the process of "exchange rate pass-through" generally occurs with a lag - the "marmite row" may have been a harbinger of things to come).  The inflation will hit lower-income families especially hard, according to Evans-Pritchard's column, because the government has frozen some benefit payments, so inflation will cause their real value to fall.

Rising costs for imports don't only impact consumers - they also affect producers.  On the one hand, domestic producers benefit from increases in the relative prices of imported substitutes.  On the other - and this is becoming more and more relevant in an age of global supply chains - prices of imported inputs (intermediate goods) will rise, increasing production costs.

With the rise in cost of intermediate inputs and the greater costs of selling to its main trading partners, the impact of Brexit looks like a negative supply shock.  Supply shocks create a nasty dilemma for monetary policy.  Policy can "accommodate" the shock by allowing inflation to rise - doing so minimizes the increase in unemployment and helps keep output near its (diminished) potential.  Or the Bank of England could tighten policy to keep inflation in check, with negative consequences for output and employment.

The risk with accommodation is not just inflation itself, but a potential increase in inflation expectations and loss of the central bank's credibility. Part of the standard interpretation of 1970's stagflation is that the Fed was too accommodating after the 1973 oil shock, and which contributed to inflation expectations getting out of control.

The Bank of England has a formal 2% inflation target; right now inflation is running below target, but that will change.

I personally think its to Bank of England's credit that it's allowed inflation go above target at a couple of points during the turmoil of recent years.  If their policy is credible, an occasional miss doesn't cause inflation expectations to rise.  But the point of inflation targeting is to achieve credibility by meeting a stated target, so the BofE may be putting that at risk if it's always seen to be accommodating shocks.

*corrected 10/26

Opportunistic Flexibility

Last week, China moved to allow more flexibility in its exchange rate.  In this case, that meant a downward movement - headlines about a "devaluation" were rather overstated, though, as the depreciation from Monday to Thursday was about 3% (followed by a slight rise on Friday).  Last week's change is at the end of the graph:

Note, the graph is the yuan price of a dollar, so a downward movement is a yuan appreciation.

China has been criticized over the years for keeping its exchange rate undervalued to support its exports.  The graph shows that it has allowed the yuan to rise quite a bit since 2005, though it has done so in a controlled manner and took a pause for about two years starting in mid-2008.  Its appreciation has helped China make progress on one aspect of "rebalancing" - reducing its dependence on exports.  China's current account surplus is considerably smaller relative to GDP than it was in 2006-08:

So, does this move represent a return to China's old ways of undervaluing its currency to gain a competitive edge for its exports?

Well, yes and no...

As it has followed the dollar, and the dollar has risen, the yuan has appreciated in real terms.  This chart shows a trade-weighted average of the dollar:

During the last year the dollar has appreciated significantly and the yuan has been along for the ride.  Currency appreciation - which makes Chinese goods relatively more expensive on world markets - combined with a slowing economy led to political pressure for a change of course.  The Times' Keith Bradsher writes:

In a little-noted advisory to government agencies, the cabinet said it was essential to fix the export problem, and the currency had to be part of the solution.

With the government keeping a tight grip on the value of the renminbi, Chinese goods were more expensive than rivals’ products overseas. The currencies of other emerging markets had fallen, and China’s exporters could not easily compete.

Soon after, the Communist Party leaders issued a statement also urging action on exports.

However, China has also been moving in the direction of greater financial openness; this entails allowing freer exchange rate movements (as I discussed in this previous post), particularly if it wants the yuan to become an international reserve currency (a status Krugman rightly notes is highly overrated).  At Project Syndicate, Yu Yongding writes:

From now on, China’s government declared, the renminbi’s central parity rate will align more closely with the previous day’s closing spot rates. This suggests that the devaluation was aimed primarily at giving the markets a greater role in determining the renminbi exchange rate, with the goal of enabling deeper currency reform.

So, yes, China has other reasons for moving to a more flexible exchange rate, but it is convenient for them to take a step in that direction at a moment when doing so means a fall in the yuan that will boost demand for Chinese goods.

See also: Ambrose-Evans Pritchard, Gavyn Davies, Michael Klein, David Beckworth, Michael Pettis.

Professor Keynes is Optimistic

An archive of British Movietone newsreels has been added to YouTube, including one of John Maynard Keynes commenting on Britain's departure from the gold standard in 1931: Another newsreel discusses leaving the gold standard and includes footage of Sir Josiah Stamp explaining the decision: This Telegraph article describes some of the correspondence between the bank and the government about the crisis.  Britain's exit - after painfully resuming the gold standard at its prewar parity in 1925 - was one episode in a series of sterling crises in the 20th century. Last year, I posted some newsreels from the 1949 and 1967 devaluations.  

Note: An earlier post from 2011 had a fragment of the same Keynes newsreel, but now we are fortunate to have it in full.

Trade-Related (?)

Economic theory provides a number of useful tools for thinking about tariffs, and these tend to frame economists' instincts when it comes to discussions about "free trade agreements."  However, in many cases, tariffs are already quite low (perhaps this is a rare success for economists' powers of persuasion...) and the main ingredients of trade agreements concern other things which are trickier to analyze.

One aspect of contemporary trade agreements that is coming under scrutiny in the discussions over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are provisions to protect foreign investors by allowing them to take disputes with governments to arbitration.  This Vox piece by Danielle Kurtzleben is a nice summary of the debate concerning these investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) rules.

Another issue getting considerable attention in the TPP discussions is the fact that trade agreements typically do not deal with currencies.  As the Times reported, many in Congress are pushing for incorporating a provision to deal with "currency manipulation" into the TPP.

This is a tricky issue which cuts across economics' division between international trade - which uses microeconomic theory to analyze long-run equilibria - and open-economy macroeconomics, which is concerned with monetary and balance of payments issues (which are "short-run" but can have meaningfully persistent effects).  At an institutional level, trade policy is usually the purview of trade ministers (e.g., the US Trade Representative), while currency policy falls to central banks and finance ministers (i.e., the Treasury in the US).  Globally, trade has the WTO, while currencies have the IMF (which, unlike the WTO, does not have any enforcement mechanisms).

Simon Johnson and Jared Bernstein have written in favor of inserting a currency clause, while Edwin Truman argues the contrary.  Janet Yellen expressed concern about the potential for trade agreements to encroach on monetary policy, and Jeffrey Frankel noted that some of the loudest concerns about currency manipulation aimed at China (not currently a party to the TPP) are out of date.

Franc Notes

Switzerland abruptly ended its ceiling on the euro-franc exchange rate last week, resulting in a 20% appreciation of the franc.

This highlights one fact of fixed exchange rates: no peg is forever.  This fact lends some drama to foreign exchange markets.  Normally pegs collapse in the other direction - a country which is trying to keep its currency over-valued spends down its reserves of foreign currency and faces speculative attacks from traders who believe it cannot sustain the policy, and the attacks make the policy even harder to sustain (e.g., Britain's 1992 ejection from the european exchange rate mechanism).  Since Switzerland's intervention involved keeping its currency under-valued relative to its market price, it was selling Swiss francs for euros.  In doing so, it accumulated reserves, so the possibility of running out which could have forced a crisis did not exist.

Normally, I'm not a fan of fixed exchange rates, but Switzerland's motivation for implementing the ceiling was understandable, as it faced huge financial inflows seeking a "safe haven" during some of the worst parts of the euro crisis.

On the graph, the exchange rate is the euro price of the franc, so an increase is a franc appreciation.  One can see the rapid appreciation in 2010-11 before the intervention, as well as the spike at the very end when the Swiss National Bank lifted the ceiling.

One of the problems of a fixed exchange rate is that it forces monetary policy to follow an external objective, rather than focusing on the state of the domestic economy.  In this case, Switzerland's policy had been forcing it to expand the supply of francs.  While this can be inflationary, in a world where deflation is the main worry, expansionary policy is appropriate (and Switzerland was not seeing any problems with inflation).  However, Switzerland does have low unemployment and a huge current account surplus.  Allowing its currency to appreciate will help its current account adjust.  It also means that the franc will not be locked into following the euro on its downward trend relative to the dollar and other currencies (the SNB's move also makes it easier for the ECB to exploit the exchange rate channel to stimulate the european economy).  Floating the franc does mean that the SNB once again faces the prospect of inflows seeking a safe haven - its trying to combat this with negative interest rates (the costs associated with holding large amounts of cash create a bit of space for negative returns on financial assets).

There has been quite a bit of commentary on this, which Brad DeLong nicely rounded up in one of his "socratic dialogues."  This guest post at The Economist's Free Exchange by Simon Cox of BNY Mellon seems to me like a sensible take.

Sterling Crisis!

The British Pathe newsreel archive is now on youtube.  This is how they chronicled Britain's 1949 devaluation:

While floating exchange rates have day-to-day volatility, they don't provide the same drama as fixed exchange rates, which are prone to crises that are both political and economic.

The postwar Bretton Woods system fixed exchange rates with the dollar (and pegged the dollar to gold), but countries were allowed to make discrete changes in their parities.  Britain availed itself of  this in 1949 and 1967.

The Bretton Woods system ended in 1971 when the US announced that it would no longer redeem dollars for gold.

Sterling faced speculative pressure in the mid-1960's - "in a world of international finance, there is no sentiment; nations, whose currency is ailing must expect from the foreign dealers a kick in the moneybags"-

Which ultimately led to the 1967 devaluation:

Sterling crises were not unique to the Bretton Woods era.  Britain had left the gold standard in 1931 (after a very painful experience re-joining it in 1925).  In 1976, a plummeting pound led Britain to turn to the IMF for a loan, and, on "Black Wednesday" in 1992,  it was forced out of the European Monetary System.

Coming Soon: "Gung Ho 2"?

Reading stories like this in the Detroit papers in the 1980s may have planted a seed in the mind of a young man who would grow up to be an economist specializing in exchange rates:

Bill Ford, executive chairman, put it this way when I talked with him Tuesday:

“It’s all about fairness, really,” he said. “I think what this country went through to re-establish our manufacturing base when we almost lost it. … For us now to give that away in a bad trade agreement makes no sense to me.

“I think manufacturing in this country matters a lot,” Ford continued. “It matters to this area. We’re not only just getting back on our feet, but as you know, really hitting on all cylinders. We’re hiring lots of Americans for both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. But a bad trade agreement could jeopardize that, and we will not let that happen.”

Ford executives are rightly proud that their company — without a federal bailout — took steps to right-size itself, boost productivity, rebuild its credit rating and revamp its product lineup to be competitive with the world’s top automakers.

But then, since last November, they’ve watched as their company’s Japanese rivals got a huge boost from a drop of nearly 20% in the value of the Japanese yen compared to the U.S. dollar.

Oh, wait, that's not from the 1980s - its from last week.  What is going on?

Certainly the fall in the Yen is helpful for Japanese exporters.  According to the Washington Post's Neil Irwin:

It’s been a good year so far for automakers. And it’s been an even better year for Toyota. The company reported its second-quarter earnings Friday, which included this whopping number: Sales were up 14 percent over a year earlier. The company hiked its estimate for 2013 earnings by 8 percent. And operating profit rose 88 percent.

The results were enough to spark a 6 percent rise in Toyota’s U.S.-listed shares, and surely to strike fear in the hearts of Toyota’s competitors. As Bloomberg news points out, while Toyota was edged out by General Motors in number of cars and trucks sold, it recorded more than three times the profit....

Of the 272 billion yen in higher earnings that Toyota reported Friday, 260 billion are attributable to foreign exchange swings, according to Toyota’s own estimates. Toyota has taken advantage of costs that are now 25 percent lower on the global marketplace (at least for those cars and parts built in Japan, rather than in satellite plants elsewhere).

The yen has depreciated about 25% relative to the dollar in the past year:

(Note: the graph shows the yen price of a dollar, so a rise is a yen depreciation/dollar appreciation.)

Is this "currency manipulation" as some in Detroit and Washington would have it?  The most straightforward explanation of the yen's decline would be a more expansionary monetary policy under the new Bank of Japan Governor, Haruhiko Kuroda (appointed by the new government of Shinzo Abe).  One of the effects of expanding the quantity of money is to reduce the value of it, both domestically (inflation) and relative to others (depreciation), and since currencies are traded in financial markets, the effects of expansionary policies can show up quickly in exchange rates (indeed, markets are forward-looking, so only a change in expectations is needed).  In the case of Japan, which has suffered from deflationary sluggishness for a couple of decades now, a shift to a more expansionary policy regime seems appropriate.

Taking a longer view, the recent decline is partly retracing the yen's appreciation during the financial crisis (when, even more than the dollar, it was seen as a "safe haven") and afterwards, when the dollar was falling due to the Fed's "quantitative easing" expansionary policies.

"Manipulation" is a loaded term, and determining when it occurs is subjective (I think the term could reasonably be applied when governments intervene in foreign exchange markets - the evidence of this would be in official holdings of currency reserves).  But its common for trading partners to grumble when your currency falls, even if the depreciation results from a monetary policy appropriate for domestic conditions.  The US was on the other side of this type of criticism a few years ago when the Fed was being accused of stoking "currency wars."

Of course, even if one takes the view Japan is (unfairly) "manipulating" its currency, there isn't really a mechanism to do anything about it.  Mirroring the divide in the economics profession where "international trade" is studied by microeconomists and exchange rates ("international finance") is the province of macroeconomists, the world has separate institutions for dealing with "trade" problems and "monetary" ones.  If a country attempts to boost net exports with a tariff, its trading partners have recourse to the WTO (and, in many cases, provisions of preferential trading agreements as well).  Doing the same thing through currency depreciation, well... the institution that has purview over exchange rates, the IMF, doesn't really have any mechanisms to settle grievances, so government officials are left to hector each other, and, on rare occasion, agree to coordinated policies.

In the case of the relative lack of US presence in the Japanese auto market, which has been consistent throughout the ups and downs of the yen-dollar exchange rate, the culprit (to the extent its driven by policy, not consumer preferences) is more likely in "non-tariff barriers" (NTBs).  While tariffs are easy to see, analyze and bargain over, imports can be impeded in more subtle ways that are more difficult to identify and deal with.  Often, what some see as a non-tariff barrier can be defended as a safety or environmental regulation.  In his "proposal to level the playing field" this is how Sander Levin (D-MI; my old congressman) characterizes Japan's auto sector NTBs:

These barriers have included: a discriminatory system of taxes; onerous and costly vehicle certification procedures for imported automobiles; a complex and changing set of safety, noise, and pollution standards, many of which do not conform to international standards and add significant development and production costs for automobiles exported to Japan; an unwillingness by Japanese dealerships to carry foreign automobiles and insufficient enforcement of competition laws to address anti-competitive practices; zoning restrictions that make it difficult, if not impossible, to establish new dealerships in important markets; and exclusionary consumer preferences shaped by decades of government policies directed at promoting the national car companies. 

Of course, that's not exactly an unbiased source (methinks "exclusionary consumer preferences" a bit of a stretch).  The occasion for Levin's proposal is Japan's entry into the negotiations over the "Trans Pacific Partnership" (TPP) trade agreement.  Overall, these preferential trade agreements are somewhat of a mixed bag.  They represent a "deeper" form of integration than the WTO and, as such, tend to extend further into areas typically thought of as "domestic" policy and may include such things as harmonization of regulations.  Whatever else one may think of it, the TPP negotiations may therefore be a good vehicle for addressing NTBs.  The US Trade Representative's office is promising to work on it, and already claiming some progress:

On April 12th, Japan announced its unilateral decision to more than double the number of motor vehicles eligible for import under its Preferential Handling Procedure (PHP), a simpler and faster certification method often used by U.S. auto manufacturers to export to Japan. In the near term, U.S. auto producers will be allowed to export up to 5,000 vehicles annually of each vehicle “type” under the PHP program, compared with the current annual ceiling of 2,000 vehicles per vehicle type. The United States and Japan have agreed to address a broad range of non-tariff measures in Japan’s automotive sector –including those related to transparency in regulations, standards, certification, “green” and new technology vehicles, and distribution – in a bilateral negotiation parallel to the TPP talks. In addition, they agreed to negotiate a special motor vehicle safeguard provision, as well as a mechanism to “snap back” tariffs as a remedy in dispute settlement cases.

Moreover, it appears that the Abe government plans to use the TPP as a cudgel to overcome domestic resistance to various domestic "reforms" that it wants to achieve as part of the "third arrow" of Abenomics.

Nonetheless, I don't think the US automakers should expect a big increase in the number their products cruising the roads of Japan anytime soon.  Issues of "currency manipulation" and non-tarriff barriers are invariably sticky ones - separating currency manipulation from valid monetary policy is subjective, and distinguishing legitimate regulations from disguised trade barriers is often very tricky.  Voluntary export restraints, anyone?

The post title is a reference to this, from the 80s.

China to Switch Sides (of the Trilemma)?

At Wonkblog, Neil Irwin rightly points out that China's announced intention to liberalize financial flows by making it easier to convert renminbi into foreign currency is a big deal.  He writes:

China is essentially weighing a trade-off.  A transition to a freer, more market-based financial system could pack many advantages, including a more efficient system of funneling savings into productive investment, more reliable savings vehicles available for its citizens, and advantages for Chinese companies as they do business across Asia and beyond.

But getting those advantages will come at a price. It means pivoting away from an export-led growth strategy that has been wildly successful over the last generation and has benefited from an artificially low yuan. It leaves China with greater risk of volatile capital flows that have created booms and busts, and bursts of inflation, in many other emerging economies over the years.  And most importantly, from the vantage point of the ruling Communist party, it will mean ceding some of the power now held by top party officials to the hard-to-corral whims of markets.

As Greg Mankiw explains, the international finance "trilemma" (or "impossible trinity" for those who think "trilemma" sounds too silly) implies that a country cannot simultaneously have (i) free capital mobility (financial flows) (ii) a fixed exchange rate and (iii) monetary policy autonomy.  That is, on this diagram, all countries must choose a side:

China's current policy puts it on the right-hand side; while the yuan is no longer pegged to the dollar, its value is heavily managed.  The capital controls come in by preventing foreigners from buying yuan when interest rates in China rise (which would otherwise cause the yuan to appreciate).  Allowing relatively free financial flows and letting the yuan float would put it on the left-hand side, which is where the US is.

There is likely a significant pent-up demand demand for yuan- denominated assets and the rest of the world would soon take advantage of the opportunity to diversify portfolios by investing in China.  Furthermore, free capital flows would help the yuan to gain status as a "reserve currency" held by governments (it isn't one now because nobody wants to hold reserves in a currency they can't freely exchange).  Purchases of Chinese assets by investors and governments would cause the yuan to appreciate (which would be partly offset by outflows as Chinese buy more foreign assets).  This would hurt Chinese exports but raise its wealth and increase its consumption, helping to "rebalance" its economy toward a more consumer-oriented model (currently, consumption is about 35% of China's GDP, versus roughly 70% in the US).

China's policy of intervening to keep the yuan undervalued (relative to what it would be under a free float) means that its been buying alot of dollar-denominated assets.  A reduction in this buying, as well as possibly lower demand for dollars from other countries if the yuan takes market share as a reserve currency, would mean a dollar depreciation.  This would boost US exports, while lowering the purchasing power of consumers, thus rebalancing the US economy in the opposite direction of China's.  In general, the financial inflows associated with the dollar's unique role have meant lower interest rates for the US - while this has been called our "exorbitant privilege", it is, at best, a mixed blessing, as it has distorted the US economy away from tradable goods production and helped fuel the previous decade's housing bubble.  Ceteris paribus, the changes discussed above imply higher interest rates for the US, but for the immediate future, one would expect the Fed to try to make offsetting adjustments.

Allowing the yuan to appreciate would also make exports from other developing countries more competitive, and reduce the pressure on them to keep their currencies undervalued.  That is, the biggest beneficiary of a shift by China might be Mexico.

Rebalancing Watch, China Edition

We'll be discussing the US-China trade imbalance in Econ 270 next week.  This played a prominent role in worries about "global imbalances" that were prevalent several years ago.  The concerns linger, but both the US current account deficit and China's surplus have come down significantly over the past several years. 

I discussed the US current account in a recent post.  China recently reported a trade deficit (!).  That was a bit of a fluke, according to The Economist:

China’s trade balance often dips around Chinese New Year, as export factories close for the festival. The holiday also arrived earlier this year than last, distorting the data. But even if the figures for January and February are added together, China ran a deficit of over $4 billion. Exports and imports typically rebound in sync as China gets back to work. This year, imports rebounded alone.

But the broader trend is for a significantly sinking surplus. Jeff Frankel attributes this to real appreciation:

[T]he yuan was finally allowed to appreciate against the dollar during 2005-08 and 2010-11, by 25% cumulatively [=17% + 8%]. Second, and more importantly, labor shortages began to appear and Chinese workers at last began to win rapid wage increases. Major cities raised their minimum wages sharply over each of the last three years [FT, Jan. 5]: 22% on average in 2010 and 2011 (somewhat less this year, in response to slowing demand: 8.6 % in Beijing, 13% in Shenzhen and Shanghai). Meanwhile another cost of business, land prices, rose even more rapidly.

As a result, whereas all signs still pointed to a substantially undervalued yuan as recently as four or five years ago, this is no longer the case. One important measure of undervaluation — a comparison of China’s prices with what is normal given the country’s level of income (the so-called Balassa-Samuelson relationship) — showed the renminbi as undervalued against the dollar by as much as 36% on 2000 data (Frankel, 2005) . Even after an improvement in the international price data, Balassa-Samuelson regressions estimated the undervaluation at roughly 30% in 2005 and 25% as recently as 2009. (Others had other ways of estimating undervaluation; see Goldstein, 2004, and those surveyed by Cline and Williamson, 2008.)

The renminbi’s real appreciation against the dollar over the last three years has amounted to 12%, reducing the degree of undervaluation by roughly half, depending on whether one measures it against the dollar or against all countries. More is to be expected, as Chinese relative wages continue to rise. In any case, China’s real exchange rate is already closer to this measure of equilibrium than are most countries’ exchange rates (Cheung, Chinn and Fuji, 2010).

However, Michael Pettis argues that China is trading external imbalances for internal ones (and trouble down the road...):

So is China rebalancing?  Of course not.  Rebalancing would require that the domestic consumption share of GDP rise.  Is the consumption share of GDP rising?  Clearly not.  If consumption had increased its share of GDP since the onset of the crisis, the savings share of GDP would be declining.

And yet savings continue to rise.  This is the opposite of rebalancing, and it should not come as a surprise.  Beijing is trying to increase the consumption share of GDP by subsidizing certain types of household consumption (white goods, cars), but since the subsidies are paid for indirectly by the household sector, the net effect is to take away with one hand what it offers with the other.  This is no way to increase consumption.

Meanwhile investment continues to grow and, with it, debt continues to grow, and since the only way to manage all this debt is to continue repressing interest rates at the expense of household depositors, households have to increase their savings rates to make up the difference.  So national savings continue to rise.

That sounds like trouble, though this Economist article noted that there are some reasons to believe that estimates of Chinese consumption might be understated:

China’s official statistics show private consumption growing less quickly than the economy as a whole from 2001 to 2010. But they also show retail sales growing faster than GDP from 2008 to 2010. The discrepancy is partly because China’s retail-sales figures include some things they should not (such as government purchases and sales of chemicals and other wholesale goods), and miss out other things (like health care and other services), that are a big part of consumer spending. But several economists also believe the official figures understate private consumption.

To derive an alternative measure, Yiping Huang and his colleagues at Barclays Capital, an investment bank, have tried to pick out those retail sales that are likely to reflect consumer purchases. He has combined those purchases with sales figures for service firms. By this alternative measure, consumption fell as a share of GDP until 2008, but started growing strongly thereafter. “Rebalancing of the Chinese economy has already started,” the Barclays economists conclude.

Me and the "Mussa Puzzle"

The international economist, and former chief economist of the IMF, Michael Mussa, died earlier this week.  I never met the man, and reading these remembrances from the Peterson Institute makes me sorry I didn't.  But we have done some work in the same area: one of my own favorite papers confirms one of Mussa's most well-known findings, that the behavior of real exchange rates depends on whether nominal exchange rates are fixed or floating.  Paul Krugman explains:

Probably his most influential paper — certainly the one that had the biggest impact on me — was his 1986 paper (pdf) on currency regimes and the behavior of real exchange rates. This bore on the question of whether exchange rate changes make adjustments in relative costs and prices easier; it bore more broadly on the question of whether prices are flexible, as fresh-water economists like to assume, or instead sticky in nominal terms.

Mussa had a simple but powerful insight: if prices were flexible, then all relative prices should be determined by “real” factors, and their behavior shouldn’t change if, say, a country goes from a fixed exchange rate to a flexible rate or vice versa. As he pointed out, this proposition could be tested using a natural experiment, the breakdown of Bretton Woods and the move to floating rates. Did the behavior of real exchange rates — relative price levels expressed in a common currency — change?

I've seen the large increase in real exchange rate volatility under floats referred to as "the Mussa puzzle", though, as Krugman points out, "sticky" prices are a straightforward explanation.

I was able to address one significant limitation of Mussa's analysis. His paper relied heavily on a comparison of the periods immediately before and after exchange rates began to float in the early 1970's.  That left open the possibility that some other changes at around the same time led to the difference in real exchange rate behavior.  Vittorio Grilli and Graciela Kaminsky made that argument in a 1991 Journal of Monetary Economics paper:

In particular, the high volatility of the real exchange rate since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s may have arisen as a consequence of factors unrelated to the nominal exchange rate regime - such as the two oil price shocks of the 1970s or the wide fluctuations in interest rates during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

However, in "Across Time and Regimes: 212 Years of the US-UK Real Exchange Rate" (Economic Inquiry 48:4 [October 2010]), I exploited the fact that the exchange rate between the US and Britain has alternated a number of times between fixed and floating.  One of the tables in the paper shows the average monthly change in the real exchange rate during different regimes.

1. Jan. 1794-Apr. 1821 (floating): 2.66%
2. May 1821-Dec. 1861 (fixed): 2.02%
3. Jan. 1862-Dec. 1878 (floating): 2.52%
4. Jan. 1879-June 1914 (fixed): 1.17%
5. July 1914-Mar. 1919 (wartime controls): 1.75%
6. Apr. 1919-Apr. 1925 (floating): 2.03%
7. May 1925-Aug. 1931 (fixed): 0.98%
8. Sept. 1931-Aug. 1939 (floating): 1.77%
9. Sept. 1939-Sept. 1949 (wartime controls): 1.52%
10. Oct. 1949-July 1971 (fixed): 0.49%
11. Aug. 1971-Dec. 2005 (floating): 1.97%

The pattern of higher volatility in floating periods is a robust one (and there is more statistical evidence in the paper). However, the differences between fixed and floating are smaller in earlier periods, which suggests that perhaps price stickiness has become more important over time.

A Goolsbee is Haunting Europe

In a WSJ op-ed, further elaborated in an interview with Ezra Klein, Austan Goolsbee lays out some of the fundamental problems of the Euro, which go deeper than the immediate financial crisis.  In particular, the common currency closes off the avenue of exchange rate adjustment. That is, without the Euro, the DM would be rising and the Lira and Peseta falling, improving Italian and Spanish current account balances.  He concludes:

[E]ven if Europe addresses the banking-capitalization crisis of the moment, and even if it struggles its way through the near-term fiscal crises of Greece and Italy, then what? With little prospect for growth in its South, Europe remains on the romantic road to nowhere—a road that merely runs in a circle. Without growth there will always be another fiscal crisis ahead for yet another country unable to balance its budget but prevented from devaluing and exporting its way forward.

On this path, Europeans will forever need to fight off financial and fiscal panics while trying to build their castle on a hill.

What really matters is the real exchange rate - i.e., the price of one country's goods in terms of another's.  The real exchange rate between two countries is the nominal exchange rate times the ratio of the countries' price levels.  Even if both countries have the same currency, the real exchange rate changes if they have different inflation rates.  This means that Greece, Italy and Spain can have a real depreciation vis a vis Germany by having lower inflation, which would, over time, make their goods relatively cheaper.  Of course, to get very far with this, if German inflation is low, then the peripheral countries' price levels actually need to fall.  This is sometimes called "internal devaluation", and because it entails deflation, is quite painful.  This what Goolsbee is talking about when he says: "In the short run, that would mean directly and significantly grinding down wages to make them competitive—a grisly option, prone to causing mass unrest."

I think this would be significantly less painful if it didn't involve price levels actually falling and, in principle, it doesn't have to.  For simplicity, say the Eurozone consists of a "core" and "periphery" of equal size.  If Eurozone inflation is 4%, it could be 7% in the core and 1% in the periphery, which means the periphery experiences real depreciation at a 6% rate.  However, the ECB is quite firm about sticking to its mandate - which reflects German preferences - for inflation at or below 2%.

In a way, this is analogous to the Akerlof-Dickens-Perry case that slightly positive inflation facilitates real wage adjustment because it allows some real wages to fall without forcing very difficult nominal wage cuts.

Eurosnark

A nice column from Floyd Norris on the parallels between Argentina's exit from its dollar peg, and Greece's potential exit from the euro.  It would be messy, in part because there is no legal mechanism in place to do that; or as Norris puts it:

The euro was designed to be the Roach Motel of currencies. Once you enter, you can never leave. There is no provision for departure. 

Hmm... Norris' column might be a good reading for Econ 270, but will Greece still be in the euro by spring semester??

Norris is referencing this vintage TV ad.

A Silver Lining to the Debt Ceiling Fiasco?

In a recent Project Syndicate column, Stephen Roach shared some observations from recent conversations with Chinese policymakers, who were not pleased with the debt ceiling mess:

Senior Chinese officials are appalled at how the United States allows politics to trump financial stability. One high-ranking policymaker noted in mid-July, “This is truly shocking… We understand politics, but your government’s continued recklessness is astonishing.”

Roach suggests that China may be losing its appetite for US Treasuries, and this, he believes, spells trouble for the US:

So China, the largest foreign buyer of US government paper, will soon say, “enough.” Yet another vacuous budget deal, in conjunction with weaker-than-expected growth for the US economy for years to come, spells a protracted period of outsize government deficits. That raises the biggest question of all: lacking in Chinese demand for Treasuries, how will a savings-strapped US economy fund itself without suffering a sharp decline in the dollar and/or a major increase in real long-term interest rates?

The US should hope he's right.  An abrupt reversal would be very disruptive, though it would probably do more harm to China than the US (provided the Fed steps in to limit the increase in US interest rates).  But China's massive purchases of US assets aren't a benefit to the US overall - they are part of a policy that has distorted the US economy away from tradable goods production and towards excess homebuilding (and asset bubbles).

The reason China has accumulated gigantic holdings of US Treasuries is that it has been intervening in foreign exchange markets - selling renminbi for dollars - to keep the value of its own currency down and the dollar up.  It then invests the dollars in Treasuries (i.e., the Treasury bond holdings are a consequence of the foreign exchange policy).  The result is US-produced goods are more expensive relative to Chinese goods. This contributes to the trade imbalance and reduces the size of US exporting and import-competing sectors.  Furthermore, many other countries feel the need to undertake similar interventions to maintain competitiveness vis a vis China, so it is not just the bilateral trade balance that is affected.

According to Roach, China has recognized the need to "rebalance" its own economy to rely less on exports and more on domestic consumption:

China has adopted a very transparent response. Its new 12th Five-Year Plan says it all – a pro-consumption shift in China’s economic structure that addresses head-on China’s unsustainable imbalances. By focusing on job creation in services, massive urbanization, and the broadening of its social safety net, there will be a big boost to labor income and consumer purchasing power. As a result, the consumption share of the Chinese economy could increase by at least five percentage points of GDP by 2015.

If the debt ceiling mess has given China's leadership a greater sense of urgency to get on with that, that's a good thing for them, and for us.

Roach's column came out before the S&P downgrade, but that may have reinforced China's views.

Cavallo on Greece

Some have likened Greece's situation today to Argentina's in 2001, when, after repeated austerity "cures" failed, it ultimately was forced off its peg to the dollar and suffered a severe crisis, but a floating currency ultimately facilitated a recovery.   In a Vox column, former Argentine finance minister Domingo Cavallo offers some reflections on Argentina's experience and what it suggests for Greece.  Unfortunately for them, he says "Greece’s crisis is much more difficult to manage than the 2001 Argentinean crisis." (Yikes!!).   He offers some suggestions on how the debt restructuring should be done (and I think everyone who isn't a European government official sees that it needs to be done), but doesn't think Greece should leave the Euro.

A Real Appreciation for China (Cont'd)

Another day brings more evidence that inflation in China may be taking care of the undervalued renminbi problem (see this previous post).

The Economist:

In adjusting current accounts, what matters is the real exchange rate (which takes account of relative inflation rates at home and abroad). Movements in nominal exchange rates often do not achieve the desired adjustment in real rates because they may be offset by changing domestic prices. For example, the yen’s trade-weighted value is around 150% stronger than it was in 1985. Yet Japan’s current-account surplus remains big because that appreciation has been largely offset by a fall in domestic Japanese wholesale prices, so exporters remain competitive.

An alternative way to lift a real exchange rate is through higher inflation than abroad. To an American buyer, a 5% increase in the yuan price of Chinese exports is the same as a 5% appreciation of the yuan against the dollar.

Fred Bergsten (interviewed by Michael Casey):

The real [inflation-adjusted] renmimbi exchange rate has appreciated against the dollar at an annual rate of about 12% since last June, although considerably less on a trade-weighted basis. The dollar has fallen against most other currencies, so on a trade-weighted basis, the renmimbi has risen less. On the other hand, one has to accept that the Chinese think of this totally in dollar terms. So the dollar exchange rate is a legitimate focus for them, and if you believe that the dollar is going to bounce around and come back over time it will drag the renmimbi back up with it [against those other currencies.]

They have been letting [the real exchange rate] go up an average of 10 to 12% on an annual basis so it’s fair to say that if they would let that continue for another couple of years they would achieve a restoration of underlying equilibrium in the exchange rate. That would take away most, if not all, of the distortions that their persistent interventions have created....

[G]iven China’s history of hyperinflation, it would be far better to adjust via the nominal rate. It has always surprised me that they seem to prefer to do part of it through inflation. And now that they are really worried about inflation, which has become the focal point of their economic policy, this would be the perfect time for them to let the currency adjust. They know the currency is going to adjust over time anyway and it is better to let it happen through the nominal rate. At the same time, it’s an ideal time for us if they make the move now because it will help rebalance our external accounts and help deal with our high unemployment. From the standpoint of both sides there couldn’t be a better time to adjust the nominal exchange rate for the renmimbi.

See also Bergsten's commentary "A Breakthrough on the Renminbi?" at the Peterson Institute's blog.

The Savings Glut, Revisited

In a speech on "Global Imbalances" today in Paris, Ben Bernanke revisited the "savings glut" hypothesis he offered in 2005.  The current account balance (CA) is the difference between investment (I) and net national saving (NS):

 CA = NS-I

A current account deficit occurs when investment is greater than domestic saving - the gap is filled by selling assets to the rest of the world.

Although it is commonplace to criticize deficit countries for low savings - and the savings rate in the US did indeed become very low - Bernanke argued in 2005 that the US current account deficit was driven by foreign savings.  The financial inflows stemming from the foreign "savings glut" drove up the prices of US assets (including bonds, thereby driving down interest rates), and the decline in US savings followed from the resultant increase in wealth.

As a share of GDP, the US current account deficit peaked at just over 6% of GDP in early 2006.

I today's speech, Bernanke cites evidence that there was strong international demand for "safe" US assets, which supports his 2005 hypothesis.

He is careful not to blame the financial inflows for the crisis.  The failure was how the US dealt with them.  This has a parallel to the 1997 Asian financial crisis:

The preferences of foreign investors for highly rated U.S. assets, together with similar preferences by many domestic investors, had a number of implications, including for the relative yields on such assets. Importantly, though, the preference by so many investors for perceived safety created strong incentives for U.S. financial engineers to develop investment products that "transformed" risky loans into highly rated securities. Remarkably, even though a large share of new U.S. mortgages during the housing boom were of weak credit quality, financial engineering resulted in the overwhelming share of private-label mortgage-related securities being rated AAA. The underlying contradiction was, of course, ultimately exposed, at great cost to financial stability and the global economy.

To be clear, these findings are not to be read as assigning responsibility for the breakdown in U.S. financial intermediation to factors outside the United States. Instead, in analogy to the Asian crisis, the primary cause of the breakdown was the poor performance of the financial system and financial regulation in the country receiving the capital inflows, not the inflows themselves. In the case of the United States, sources of poor performance included misaligned incentives in mortgage origination, underwriting, and securitization; risk-management deficiencies among financial institutions; conflicts of interest at credit rating agencies; weaknesses in the capitalization and incentive structures of the government-sponsored enterprises; gaps and weaknesses in the financial regulatory structure; and supervisory failures.

Ouch.  That's harsh, though he could take the Asia analogy one step further - as Simon Johnson does - and acknowledge that the "breakdown" in the US was partly because we have our own form of "crony capitalism" where the financial industry has, to a degree, captured the regulatory and political system.

Bernanke also has an uncomfortable analogy for the surplus countries that are not allowing their currencies to appreciate:

These issues are hardly new. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the U.S. dollar and French franc were undervalued, with the result that both countries experienced current account surpluses and strong capital inflows. Under the unwritten but long-standing rules of the gold standard, those two countries would have been expected to allow the inflows to feed through to domestic money supplies and prices, leading to real appreciations of their currencies and, with time, to a narrowing of their external surpluses. Instead, the two nations sterilized the effects of these capital inflows on their money supplies, so that their currencies remained persistently undervalued. Under the constraints imposed by the gold standard, these policies in turn increased deflationary pressures and banking-sector strains in deficit countries such as Germany, which were losing gold and foreign deposits. Ultimately, the unwillingness of the United States and France to conduct their domestic policies by the rules of the game, together with structural vulnerabilities in financial systems and in the gold standard itself, helped destabilize the global economic and financial system and bring on the Great Depression. 

In his central banker-ly caution, he refuses to name names, but he's obviously alluding to China's policy of keeping renminbi undervalued. 

Although he has a knack for giving very comprehensive speeches sometimes, there are some important closely-related issues that Bernanke did not touch on this time.  In particular, the demand for US assets was partly due to the fact that the dollar is the most widely-used "reserve currency" (i.e., held in official portfolios).  This periodically generates complaints from the rest of the world (and for the US, its a mixed blessing), but Bernanke did not point to any alternative.  Nor did he suggest that it gives the US any special responsibility (and, personally, I don't believe that it does).  Also, one significant motive for reserve accumulation is self-insurance - countries burned by reliance on inflows of foreign savings decided to build up their own.  An better international insurance mechanism would reduce that need.  In theory, that is part of what the IMF is supposed to provide.

Update: A nice response to the gold standard analogy from Free Exchange.

Real Exchange Rates Under Fixed and Floating Regimes

On Saturday, Paul Krugman posted on a favorite topic of mine (how did he know it was my birthday?) - the interaction between real and nominal exchange rates.  Krugman takes the fact that they are very highly correlated as evidence against the classical view that money is "neutral" (i.e., it does not affect real quantities):

If you have a classical view of the world, you would argue that nominal shocks should affect the nominal, not the real exchange rate: the real exchange rate is a real phenomenon, and money is a veil. Specifically, you’d expect any nominal shock to move the price level by the same amount that they move the exchange rate. 

Moreover, Krugman explains:

Now, a classical economist could (and some did) try to explain away this observation by arguing that what’s going on here is that there are real shocks, and that monetary policy was used to stabilize each country’s price level. But then you run into another problem, highlighted in a classic paper by Mike Mussa (haven’t found the original online, but he summarized the argument here (pdf)). Mussa pointed out that the behavior of both nominal and real exchange rates changed dramatically when the exchange rate regime changed, becoming vastly more volatile with the end of Bretton Woods....

You can, if you’re desperate, try to explain this away by saying that there was some fundamental structural change in the early 1970s, but at that point you’re deep into epicycle territory. And there’s more — for example, Ireland went abruptly from having a stable real exchange rate against the UK to having a stable rate against Germany when it joined the European exchange rate mechanism, etc..

A paper of mine in the October 2010 issue of Economic Inquiry adds to the "and there's more" evidence.  It looks at the US-UK real exchange rate over 1794-2005, during which the nominal exchange rate switches from fixed to floating and back a number of times (5 floating periods and 4 fixed periods).  In this graph of the rolling average of the absolute monthly change, one can see that the real exchange rate is more volatile in floating (shaded) periods than in the adjacent fixed rate periods (the dashed lines denote the periods of government controls around the two world wars).

The biggest change in volatility is after Bretton Woods ends in 1971.  In earlier periods, the differences in real exchange rate behavior between fixed and floating regimes are not as stark, but they are there (there's more evidence in the paper).  That suggests that the classical assumption of money neutrality is invalid (in the short run), but it may have been less so in the 19th century than it is now.

Incidentally, I believe the Mussa paper Krugman is referring to is in the Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series in 1986 (vol. 25) (subscription required).

Real Appreication of Chinese Inflation

The Times' Keith Bradsher reports on inflation in China:

In China, consumer prices were 5.1 percent higher in November than a year earlier, according to official government data. And many economists say the official figures actually understate the rate of inflation, which might in reality be twice as high.

“Four percent, China can bear it — beyond 5 percent, people will complain a lot,” said Huo Jianguo, president of the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation here.

Higher global commodity prices, as well as rising wages in China, play roles in the increasing cost of Chinese goods. But economists say the main reason for the inflation now is China’s foreign exchange reserves, which surged by a record amount in the fourth quarter.

The central bank has been pumping out currency at an ever-accelerating pace over the past decade to limit the renminbi’s appreciation against the dollar. That strategy has helped preserve a competitive advantage of Chinese exporters by keeping their prices relatively low on global markets — while also protecting the jobs of tens of millions of Chinese workers in export factories.

Now, though, that cheap currency policy seems to be reaching its limits. The extra renminbi are feeding inflation. That is starting to undermine exporters’ price competitiveness — just as a stronger renminbi would do if Beijing was not intervening to begin with. 

That is, there are two ways for a real exchange rate to appreciate: through changes in (i) nominal exchange rates and (ii) relative prices (i.e., inflation).  The real exchange rate is defined as the nominal exchange rate, e, (e.g., the dollar price of renminbi) times the ratio of the two countries' price levels:

real exchange rate = e x P(China) / P(US)

While China intervenes heavily by selling renminbi for dollars to keep e from rising (and piles up massive "reserves" of dollars in the process), faster inflation in China - the increase in P(China)/P(US) - means that Americans must give up more stuff to get a unit of Chinese stuff.  That is, the relative price of Chinese goods is rising.

China is intervening as hard as ever in the foreign exchange market, according to Bradsher's article:

China’s foreign reserves leaped by $199 billion in the fourth quarter. The increase was much larger than economists had expected, and they suggested that China had roughly doubled its intervention in currency markets to around $2 billion a day. 

But the policy only works to the extent that China can offset the inflationary effects of the extra renminbi - for example by raising bank reserve requirements - and it appears they're no longer effectively able to do so.

The real increase in the price of Chinese goods will show up in US prices, but only modestly due to limited "exchange rate pass through".  In part, this is because consumer prices we pay reflect not only the price of the Chinese goods, but also the local retail and distribution costs, which are often a large portion of the retail price and not affected by the real exchange rate.  Of course, that means to effectively shift demand away from Chinese goods, the movements in the real exchange rate need to be even larger (somebody wrote a dissertation about this...).

A more important margin of adjustment may be substitution away from Chinese goods to those produced in other developing countries (i.e., this is great news for Mexico).  This Financial Times article by James Mackintosh discusses the problems created by the efforts other countries feel obligated to make in order to hold their own currencies down because of China.  Secretary Geithner raised this issue in a speech:

The undervaluation of the Chinese currency, the renminbi, and restrictions on capital flows in and out of China gave Chinese companies “a competitive advantage” and “impose substantial costs on other emerging economies that run more flexible exchange rates,” Mr. Geithner said.

“This is not a tenable policy for China or for the world economy,” he added. 

Politically, its sensible strategy for the US to try to frame China's currency policy as one that mainly hurts other developing countries rather than the US - it lets them be the bully, not us (as The Onion reported, China's closing the gap here, too). But the real appreciation also helps in terms of easing the pressure on the other countries that compete with China in export markets.

As David Leonhardt writes in his Times column:

Without taking inflation into account, the renminbi has risen 3 percent against the dollar since last summer, when China began letting it rise. Once inflation is accounted for, the real increase has been about 5 percent. At that pace, the renminbi could erase its artificial undervaluation — as some economists estimate it — in less than two years. 

Will this ease tension between the US and China?  Perhaps, but Leonhardt argues that there are bigger things to argue about:

For the United States, the No. 1 problem with China’s economy is probably intellectual property theft. Technology companies, for example, continue to notice Chinese government agencies downloading software updates for programs they have never bought, at least not legally.

No wonder China has become the world’s second-largest market for computer hardware sales — but is only the eighth-largest for software sales.

Next on the list, say people who work in China or do business there, is the myriad protectionist barriers China has put up. These barriers make this country’s recent efforts at “buy American” protectionism look minor league. In some cases, Beijing has insisted that products sold in China must not only be made there but be conceived and designed there.

Hmm....

There has been more interesting stuff written recently on the issue of "rebalancing" the current account relationship between the US and China - see Martin Feldstein, David Altig, Paul Krugman and Free Exchange.

Eichengreen on the Dollar

At Project Syndicate, Barry Eichengreen sees some interesting similarities between today's debates over the dollar's global role and those of the 1960's, when the Bretton Woods system was nearing its collapse:

In 1964, it was the rapidly growing economies of Europe, still catching up to the US, that were howling about the Federal Reserve. As a result of a recklessly expansionary American policy, they argued, they were being flooded with imported finance. The US was “exporting inflation.”

American officials countered that the financial inflows reflected Europe’s underdeveloped capital markets. Europe’s inflation problem was a byproduct of its central banks’ reluctance to tighten policy more aggressively, and European countries’ hesitancy to let their currencies rise, reflecting their long-standing commitment to export-led growth.

The effort to replace the dollar with IMF "Special Drawing Rights" (SDRs) ultimately failed, and no agreement was reached on achieving greater flexibility within the context of the Bretton Woods system:

The other focus of negotiations in the 1960’s was an effort to enhance exchange-rate flexibility. Proposals to this effect – a response to the emergence of chronic surpluses in Germany and Italy, and chronic deficits in the US – attracted growing attention once the SDR negotiations sputtered to a close in 1968.

But, with other countries having enjoyed two decades of export-led growth as a result of pegging their currencies to the dollar, there was a reluctance to mess with success. While the IMF, in a high-profile report on exchange rates in mid-1970, endorsed the principle of greater flexibility, it offered no new ideas for getting countries to move in this direction and proposed no new sanctions against countries that resisted. International imbalances continued to mount until the system came crashing down in 1971-1973.

A crucial difference between then and today's informal "Bretton Woods II" system is that the dollar is no longer linked to gold, and, therefore the US no longer has to worry about a drain on its gold reserves.  President Nixon ended the original Bretton Woods system in August 1971 with the announcement that the US would no longer redeem dollars for gold at the request of foreign governments (US citizens had lost their ability to exchange dollars for gold in 1933).

This means the "system" doesn't come to an end when the US pulls the plug, but when the surplus countries decide to stop holding and accumulating dollars.  There are really two issues: (i) the composition of official reserves - i.e., what currency they are denominated in (ii) and the level of reserves - whether surplus countries continue to intervene sell their own currencies in exchange for reserves to prevent appreciation.

In terms of the composition of reserves, writing at Vox, the prolific Prof. Eichengreen explains that there is no plausible alternative to the dollar.  The euro isn't looking so great right now, of course, and, as for the others:

There are of course a variety of smaller economies whose currencies are likely to be attractive to foreign investors, both public and private, from the Canadian loonie and Australian dollar to the Brazilian real and Indian rupee. But the bond markets of countries like Canada and Australia are too small for their currencies to ever play more than a modest role in international portfolios.

Brazilian and Indian markets are potentially larger. But these countries worry about what significant foreign purchases of their securities would mean for their export competitiveness. They worry about the implications of foreign capital inflows for inflation and asset bubbles. India therefore retains capital controls which limit the access of foreign investors to its markets, in turn limiting the attractiveness of its currency for international use. Brazil meanwhile has tripled its pre-existing tax on foreign purchases of its securities. Other emerging markets have moved in the same direction.

China is in the same boat. Ten years from now the renminbi is likely to be a major player in the international domain. But for now capital controls limit its attractiveness as an investment vehicle and an international currency. Yet this has not prevented the Malaysian central bank from adding Chinese bonds to its foreign reserves. Nor has it prevented companies like McDonald’s and Caterpillar from issuing renminbi-denominated bonds to finance their Chinese operations. But China will have to move significantly further in opening its financial markets, enhancing their liquidity, and strengthening rule of law before its currency comes into widespread international use.

So the dollar is here to stay, more likely than not, if only for want of an alternative.

Flawed as they are, Eichengreen notes, the alternatives will look more attractive if US policies severely undermine confidence in the dollar.  Not raising the debt ceiling, for example, would do the trick (and it appears the Republicans' business backers may be forcing some sense into them on this one).  As Eichengreen has it, a form of Spiderman's motto applies: "with exorbitant priviledge comes exorbitant responsibility."

Run-RMB

Taiwan's next media animation illustrates Sino-American tensions over currency policy with a rap video: