MacroScope

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.

It sounds like a paradox, but you read it right: Brazil may be in the middle of a long monetary tightening cycle despite all massive efforts to revive the economy.

“That growth has faltered after one year of the devaluation is, we believe, proof that the credit and expectation channels have been much more important than the level of the exchange rate for investments, and ultimately the self-inflicted ‘sudden stop’ contributed to the severe growth slowdown that continues to afflict the Brazilian economy today,” wrote Volpon.

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.

Maybe it never went away at all. But if the war was dormant, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff certainly launched what appeared to be an opening salvo for a new round of battles – rhetorical ones for now.

Rousseff reached for some cataclysmic language to describe the recent appreciation of the real, which Brazil worries will crimp exports and hurt the domestic economy. The culprit, according to Rousseff, is an irresponsible “monetary tsunami” resulting from the ultra-loose monetary policies of rich nations like the United States.

Alonso Soto and Tiago Pariz offer some background in this Reuters article out of Brasilia: