Chrystia Freeland

While Laura Tyson thinks America has no intention to inflate away its debt, former World Bank President Jim Wolfensohn said in an interview today he believes inflation and a devaluation of the dollar are “inevitable”:

Countries that get into heavy debt find that other countries realize that their currency isn’t as valuable as it was because they owe so much money. So the currency devalues. As it devalues, you have an inflation. And it is my judgment that that is likely to be a very important element in how we unwind this whole issue of debt to income levels in the United States.

Wolfensohn has a similarly gloomy outlook for Africa, a continent whose development he championed during his tenure at the World Bank. African institutions and governance are less efficient and effective than their counterparts in India and China, he says, and growth will suffer as a result:

I think [a coming African miracle] will happen in some few countries, but I do not think it will be anywhere near the speed that it needs to be. And it worries me enormously that you’ll have 2 billion out of 9 billion people on the planet so far behind. And they’re not running around carrying spears and hunting — they all have cellular radios, they’re all linked with the rest of the world. It’s a very different Africa, and I think we spend far too little time thinking about our responsibilities to Africa but also the role that Africa is going to play in the world of my children.

Posted by Peter Rudegeair

“There is no other policy tool available [besides quantitative easing],”‘ Laura Tyson, a former chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisors, said at this morning’s Reuters/YouTube live debate on how to fix the economy. Tyson argues that additional Fed purchases of long-term bonds is the most viable way to energize the U.S. economy since a new fiscal stimulus bill is unlikely to pass Congress:

She appears alongside Glenn Hubbard, another former CEA chairman, who maintains the Fed will spend another $1 trillion to lower rates by 20 basis points. “We can’t inflate our way to prosperity,” he said.

Tyson disagrees and thinks the risk to inflation is low. She admits we have to convince the rest of the world that the U.S. has no intention to inflate away its debt.

Reuters Global Editor-at-Large Chrystia Freeland teams up with YouTube to bring you the first-ever live debate between two of the most influential economists of the past decade, and possibly the next:

Laura Tyson and Glenn Hubbard

Live coverage begins Tuesday, October 12 at 8am ET.

To participate in and watch the live debate: Conflicting Visions: Fixing the Global Economy

For most of the past century, the big global narrative has been the clash of rival paradigms: Nazism versus liberal democracy, communism versus free market democracy, and, more recently, fundamentalist Islamic states versus the secular, democratic west. When the cold war ended, Francis Fukuyama predicted that this clash of paradigms would end. He was right, but not for the reason he thought.

The battle of rival ideologies has ended not because, as Fukuyama foresaw, the triumph of capitalist democracy has been universally acclaimed. Instead, it is because all of us have realized we face a new challenge — how to thrive in the high tech, global economy — and no one country or single ideology is yet certain of getting this exactly right.

This isn’t the cold war, or the clash of civilizations, or even the end of history — it is the age of uncertainty, as the entire world struggles to understand and keep up with the biggest economic transformation since the industrial revolution.

“When governments seek to manipulate exchange rates for competitive advantage, it rarely ends well,”  White House economic adviser Larry Summers said at the Yalta European Strategy Annual Meeting this past weekend.

Summers stressed the need for reducing global imbalances, which require both smaller surpluses in surplus countries and smaller deficits in deficit countries. Regarding the U.S. economy, Summers reiterated President Obama’s pledge to double exports in the next five years. He added that growth, “while still clearly unsatisfactory, is positive. The economy is growing. The process of recovery is underway.”

When I asked Summers if he is worried about America’s budget deficit, he said only in the long term. In the short term, Summers says the focus must be on growth:

U.S. monetary policy is flooding the world with cheap liquidity, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said at the Canadian Consulate’s “Invest in Canada” luncheon yesterday. Our current policy, he explained, acts as a competitive devaluation against emerging-market currencies. Stiglitz added that he is worried about the prospect of a currency war but conceded that there’s not anything we can do about it.

Stiglitz went on to say that what the Fed is doing is not so different from China’s interventions in the foreign-exchange markets and accused the U.S. central bank of undermining global financial market integration and only acting out of a sense of guilt:

The Fed, having created the problem in the first place, feels guilty and says, ‘We should do something to get us out of the mess.’ [...]   [Emerging markets] see this as competitive devaluation of the United States.  We say, ‘No, no.  We’re not engaged in competitive devaluation.  That’s something China does.  We don’t do those kinds of things.  We don’t manipulate our currency.  All we do is ordinary monetary policy.’  But the consequence of ordinary monetary policy is competitive devaluation.

The Chinese renminbi is “substantially undervalued,” IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said at the Yalta European Strategy Annual Meeting. But, he added, too often that’s used as an excuse by rich countries to postpone structural reforms that would restore competitiveness:

The question of a revaluation of the renminbi should not be used as a curtain behind which you’re hidden to avoid to do what you have to do in your own country.

Strauss-Kahn noted that even a one-off revaluation of the renminbi by 20% would not right the world’s imbalances. Recently, while China’s trade surplus has decreased, America’s trade deficit has not.

In an exclusive video interview, Ex-Car Czar Steven Rattner tells Chrystia Freeland that without government intervention via TARP the economy would be ”dust.”

Get ready for the next wave of globalization. The emergence of the emerging markets is old news, of course: after all, Tom Friedman discovered that the world was flat back in 2005. But even as much of the developed world is struggling with weak consumer demand and stubbornly high levels of unemployment, the emerging market countries are writing a new chapter in the story of the global economy.

We are accustomed to thinking of our economic relationship with the countries Fareed Zakaria describes as “the rest” as a two-way exchange between west and east or north and south: western companies setting up call centers in India or manufacturing their goods in China, for instance; and, more recently, savings-rich emerging market economies, especially China, investing in US treasuries, or Russian oligarchs buying London mansions.

That was Globalisation 1.0. In the next stage, some of the biggest deals and some of the most important capital flows will be between emerging markets, with no need to stop-over at Heathrow or JFK. Forget the last decade’s race-to-the-bottom rivalry between Wall Street and the City of London to be the world’s financial capital; the new motto of the moneymen, as one Manhattan banker put it to me this week, is “Mumbai, Dubai, Shanghai or goodbye.”

“The U.S… is kind of tapped out,” JetBlue founder and former CEO David Neeleman told Chrystia at this past week’s Google Zeitgeist conference. That’s why the serial entrepreneur decided to start his latest venture, Azul Airlines, in his native Brazil. Neeleman said air traffic in Brazil is expanding at three times the rate of GDP, nearly 27% a year, and that his airline is flying to cities that haven’t seen air service in years. Hear what he has to say about this and the JetBlue flight attendant who flew off the rails:

Whenever he visits Brazil, Neeleman is struck by the country’s optimism and enthusiasm, what he calls “that emerging markets buzz.” He does concede that Brazil faces some bottlenecks with infrastructure — Azul had to buy a field next to one Brazilian airport and use it as parking lot in order to keep pace with its growth — and bureaucracy — he’s pushing to reform the government agency that oversees airports — but Neeleman thinks Brazil is a safe haven for investors.