Dollarization in Argentina?

So I have no insider knowledge on what the Argentinean government plans to do. And the White House is a mess; they don't have any knowledge on what they plan to do. But Larry Kudlow, the Director of the National Economic Council, said that the Treasury is deeply involved in a plan to dollarize the Argentinean economy (Guillermo Calvo, an influential conservative economist, has also spoken in favor of dollarization; see here in Spanish).

He supports a Currency Board to solve the run on the currency, and the long-term external problems. That worked well in the 1990s, he said, without a hint of irony. The notion is that the problem, again difficult to believe this type of stuff is still around, is a fiscal problem. So, no fiscal deficits, no printing of money, no inflation, and no depreciation of the currency as the proportion of pesos to dollars increases. The logic of full employment (neoclassical theory), monetarism (Quantity Theory of Money), and a version of Purchasing Power Parity for the determination of exchange rates. It is all very simplistic.

Of course Macri's government promised to do a fiscal adjustment, and to block the central bank to lend to the treasury. But the real problem is external. There is a long-run problem of sustainability of the current account (as I noted earlier). But the real problem now, in the short-run, is the lack of reserves and the forthcoming obligations in dollars (not in pesos). My take on currency crises as being related to external problems here (and the paper here; note that this is about the long-term or fundamental causes, not necessarily the short-run crisis like the one in course now).

I should also say that the fiscal problems that exist have been caused by the government, and not only have nothing to do with the external crisis, they are instrumental, in some sense, in promoting the austerity cuts that allow for the reduction in social spending. As I noted even before the Macri governments started in 2015 (when I wrote it, but published in January 2016)*:

"the coming larger fiscal deficits will most likely be used to try to cut social welfare expenditures, which increased significantly during the administration of the outgoing president Cristina Fernández and her predecessor (and husband) Néstor Kirchner. It would not be surprising if Macri tries to privatize social security once again, something that Menem accomplished in the 1990s, and which had to be reversed in the 2000s as a result of the private system’s complete failure to provide a decent retirement for seniors."

And that is essentially what dollarization would be there to do. Tie the government's hands and help promote an even more brutal fiscal adjustment than the one the IMF (that, yes, has changed a lot, has it not?) can help impose. Why go to the US Treasury, you ask; because it can provide enough dollars to guarantee the stabilization of the currency, and perhaps some lower inflation (by stoping the pass-through to domestic prices), giving Macri or a right wing candidate a fighting chance next year in the presidential elections.

However, dollarization would not solve the long-term current account problems, it will intensify them in fact, and a new collapse like the one from 2001-02 would be inevitable. Argentinean elites, you might think, keep committing the same mistake over and over again. But there again, from their perspective this is fine. The crisis only hits the poor (and the middle classes that are still somehow afraid about the devil of populism). Macri complains about the Kirchner legacy (three years into his government), but dollarization would be truly a terrible legacy. Oh well.

PS: The government has denied plans to dollarize. There again he said in 2015 he would not devalue the currency.

* I also predicted the contraction and the devaluation, which Macri firmly denied back then.

Ramblings on 21st century macroeconomics

Guillermo Calvo wrote a post on what he thinks is the new macroeconomics. Minsky gets cited, but that's pretty much the only concession to heterodox macroeconomics. The interpretation of what the "new" macro for the 21st century should be is basically New Keynesian price/wage rigidities models cum debt-deflation (the finance and Minsky part). But even the understanding of debt-deflation is limited to the notion of sudden stops (slowdown or reversal of capital inflows).

According to him:

"many of us have been involved in developing and testing theories in which imperfections in financial markets play a central role – and coining new terms like Sudden Stop and Phoenix Miracles. The dominant view, however, was that financial crises in EMs reflected weak institutions in that part of the world, and could not possibly take place in advanced economies. Unfortunately, the subprime crisis revealed, to the dismay of many in advanced economies, especially in Europe, that the world is more uniform than we thought!"

In other words, he seems to think that market imperfections are pervasive and that developed countries are vulnerable to sudden stops, like emerging markets (a terrible name popularized in the 1990s for developing countries, as if the only thing were the 'markets'). Note that while developing countries have not experienced sudden stops with the financial crash of 2008, and have used international reserves to insure against the volatility of financial markets (and often introduced capital controls too, when those were not already in place), no significant sudden stop affected the US, the epicenter of the crisis.

As noted by several heterodox economists the crisis in the US the deep causes of the crisis were associated to wage stagnation (worsening income distribution) and the associated increase in private debt, which led to a collapse of spending in the aftermath of the Lehman crisis. Mind you, at that point capital flows went into Treasury bonds, and no sudden stop affected the American economy (in contrast to say Argentina in 2002). So no, the world is not flat or "more uniform" that Calvo thought.

Just for those that might not remember, on dollarization this is what Calvo (paper with Carmen Reinhart) used to say back in 2000 (a few years before the Argentinean crisis; he was rumored as a possible finance minister at the time in Argentina, and the notion was that he was for dollarization):

"Exchange rate movements are costly in this environment. If policymakers take a hard look at the options for exchange rate regimes in emerging economies, they may find that floating regimes may be more of an illusion and that fixed rates--particularly, full dollarization--might emerge as a sensible choice for some countries, especially in Latin America or in the transition economies in the periphery of Euroland."

The sensible choice was dollarization (sic)! Note that his point was that with sufficient fiscal austerity, credibility would be restored, and capital would flow in the right direction (if you are from Greece, you should be afraid if this is the 'new' macro).

But back to sudden stops, which is the basis of his claim to have introduced financial markets into modern macro, here is what he had to say in his post, about the puzzles ahead:

"As recent empirical research has amply demonstrated, financial crisis follows credit boom; this is somewhat of a puzzle, but the most challenging puzzle in my opinion is that credit flows (both gross and net) increase in the run up of crisis, only to crash precipitously after the crisis' onset. ... In other words, if herding is the key word, forget about microfoundations of macroeconomics. I must confess that I am not ready to take such a radical stance. My view is that perhaps this very puzzling phenomenon is linked to liquidity and, more to the point, endogenous liquidity, a phenomenon that has been largely ignored in 20th century macroeconomics."

In other words, sudden stops are associated with collapse of liquidity, and those might be associated to herding behavior, which is irrational and is not amenable to formalizing microfoundations along conventional lines. There are so many misconceptions in this quote that one wonders when is he going to get the Sveriges Riksbank Prize (the often referred to as Nobel).

Endogenous liquidity, or endogenous money is no puzzle, and in fact, mainstream models that accept a Taylor rule have basically incorporated it, like Wicksell. Herding is not that complicated to understand, and is NOT the main problem with microfoundations. The problem with microfoundations is not lack of rationality of economic agents, but the fact that even with very rational (even by the limited mainstream standards) you cannot prove that markets lead to full utilization of resources, with flexible prices and full information (yes please go read on the capital debates).

Note that the effects of debt-deflation on demand are not discussed by Calvo. Or income distribution for that matter. Let alone the recognition that the idea of a natural rate is very difficult to defend, and I don't even mean logically, just empirically after this crisis. The essential information out of this piece is about the degree of confusion of the mainstream. It is increasingly clear that that we are living in a period of decadence of economics as a science, in which the profession is dominated by Vulgar economics.