MacroScope

All the talk of currency wars is mostly just that – talk. This week’s meeting of the Group of 20 nations at the International Monetary Fund was living proof. Despite speculation that emerging nations would redouble their criticism of extraordinarily low rates in advanced economies, the G20 ended up largely supporting the Bank of Japan’s new and bold stimulus efforts aimed at combating years of deflation.

Mr. currency wars himself, Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega, told reporters Japan’s monetary drive was understandable given its struggle with falling prices and stagnant wages, even if he called for close monitoring of its potential spillover effects.

Outgoing Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney said Japan’s action is consistent with the G20 communiqué that called for countries to refrain from competitive devaluation. Carney, the head of the G20′s Financial Stability Board, takes over the Bank of England in July. His comments echo recent remarks from Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen.

“It appears with Kuroda’s and Aso’s comments and the G20′s acceptance of their explanation on monetary policy that the path is clear for the BOJ to both continue easing or enact additional easing measures if needed,” said Brian Daingerfield, currency strategist, at RBS Securities in Stamford, Connecticut.

In times of currency wars, it’s best not to shoot yourself in the foot. By imposing several capital controls in the past years, Brazil might have tightened monetary policy right when the economy started to falter, Nomura’s strategist Tony Volpon wrote in a research note on Friday.

Brazil’s mediocre economic growth in the past two years has been a mystery, indeed. Some say it has been due to the global slowdown – which contrasts with steady growth elsewhere in Latin America. Many others blame Brazil’s several supply bottlenecks. But then, why don’t businesses see them as an investment opportunity?

The missing link, Volpon argues, has been the imposition of capital controls. Inflows dropped suddenly, reducing the supply of cheap foreign money available for banks and companies. So, even though the central bank cut local interest rates ten straight times to a record low of 7.25 percent, money supply growth has actually slowed since January 2012.

How about living in a fast-growing economy with tame inflation, record-low interest rates, stable exchange rate and shrinking public debt. Sounds like paradise, doesn’t it? But Brazil may be starting to realize that this is also impossible.

Inflation hit the highest monthly reading in nearly eight years in January, rising 0.86 percent from December. It also came close to the top-end of the official target, accelerating to a rise of 6.15 percent in the 12 months through January.

That conflicts with key pillars of Brazil’s want-it-all economic policy. The central bank cut interest rates ten straight times through October 2012 to a record-low of 7.25 percent, saying Brazil no longer needed one of the world’s highest borrowing costs. The government also forced a currency depreciation of around 20 percent last year, aiming at boosting exports and stopping a flurry of cheap imports.

Tiago Pariz in Brasilia also contributed to this post.

Brazil’s Trade Minister Fernando Pimentel was the latest authority this week to fire warning shots in a resurging currency war. The government is “focused” on keeping the real at its current level of 2 per U.S. dollar, he told journalists after a meeting with fellow ministers and businessmen.

Using market rules, we are going to try to keep (foreign exchange) rates steady every time the currency is under attack.

These words came days after Finance Minister Guido Mantega admitted Brazil now has a “dirty-floating” regime. “We cannot continue watching as others take ownership of our market and bring down our industry,” he told a local newspaper.

Ironically, an increase of capital inflows to Latin America in the last few years due to unappealing ultralow yields in industrialized countries and the region’s relative economic success is posing a threat for development, according to a recent paper that provides wider background to BRIC criticism of the latest U.S. Federal Reserve´s quantitative easing.

The article, written by Argentine economists Roberto Frenkel and Martin Rapetti for the World Economic Review – an international journal of heterodox economics –  warns about the possibility of a Latin American variant of the so-called “Dutch Disease”. This is a situation where a country suddenly finds a new source of wealth that makes its currency more expensive, hurting local exports and causing traumatic de-industrialization.

“Our concern is that massive capital inflows to Latin America may have pernicious effects via an excessive appreciation of the real exchange rates, which could lead to a contraction in output and employment in tradable activities with negative effects on long-run growth”, says the paper.

Incumbency, it is often said, confers many advantages.

Sitting U.S. presidents certainly have reaped its benefits – in the past 80 years, only three have been unseated.

Most economists believe the same benefits apply to reserve currencies. Yes, the U.S. dollar may one day be supplanted as the leading international currency, the thinking goes, but that day is many decades away.

Then again, maybe not.

A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research that looks more closely at the dollar’s own rise to the top in the 20th century suggests, among other things, that “the advantages of incumbency are not all they are cracked up to be.”

The governor of the Bank of Japan, Masaaki Shirakawa, says he is confounded by the still very low level of Japanese government bond yields given the country’s elevated debt to GDP ratio of over 200 percent. Speaking on an IMF panel over the weekend, he offered a rather unintuitive explanation for the phenomenon:

It seems difficult to explain the case of Japan in light of conventional wisdom. One frequently offered explanation is that the ample domestic savings in Japan have absorbed the issuance of JGBs and the share of JGBs held by foreign investors is very small. But a more fundamental explanation is that the stability in the current bond yields reflects market participants’ expectations that fiscal soundness will be restored through structural reforms imposed in the economic and fiscal areas.

Most economists think Japanese yields are low because of continued expectations for deflation and weak economic growth. But for Shirakawa, it seems, it is public confidence in future fiscal restraint that is keeping bond yields low. Except he then contradicts this point by saying weak confidence in future fiscal reforms is also simultaneously undermining consumer spending:

With reporting from Steven C. Johnson and Nick Olivari

A lot of time and money is spent on high-profile multilateral gatherings like this weekend’s International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington. The central story this time is the Fund’s effort to raise more funds (no pun intended), which appears to have been successful as G20 nations committed more than $430 billion in new funds.

French Finance Minister François Baroin, speaking to reporters at a press briefing on the sidelines of the IMF meeting, greeted the news with optimism:

Clearly, the reinforcement of the IMF with more than $400 billion in new resources and its effects on confidence will contribute to financial stability in the euro zone.

We’re not talking about the U.S. presidential vote, though that does cast another layer of uncertainty over the outlook. Rather, investors are focused on even shorter-horizon events, as evidenced by this jam-packed electoral worry list from Marc Chandler, currency strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman:

This weekend’s first round of the French presidential election kicks of the quarter that will include:

*   Greek national elections, where polls warn that the current coalition government may not be returned, increasing the uncertainty.

The financial turmoil still dogging Europe is most often described as a debt crisis. But sovereign debt is only part of the problem, according to new research from Jay Shambaugh, economist at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. The other two prongs of what he describes as three coexisting crises are the region’s troubled banks and the prospect of an imminent recession.

These problems are mutually reinforcing, and require a more forceful policy response than the authorities have delivered to date. In particular, Shambaugh advocates using tax policy to lower labor costs, fiscal stimulus from those economies strong enough to afford it, and more aggressive action from the European Central Bank:

It is possible that coordinated shifts in payroll and consumption taxes could aid the painful process of internal devaluation. The EFSF could be used to capitalize banks and to help break the sovereign / bank link. Fiscal support in core countries could help spur growth.  Finally, the ECB could provide liquidity to sovereigns and increase nominal GDP growth as well as allow slightly faster inflation to facilitate deleveraging and relative price adjustments across regions.