The Long Twilight of Gold: How a Pivotal Practice Persisted in the Assemblage of Money

Why has gold persisted as a significant reserve asset despite momentous changes in international monetary relations since the collapse of the classical gold standard? IPE theories have little to say about this question. Conventional accounts of international monetary relations depict a succession of discrete monetary regimes characterized by specific power structures or dominant ideas. To explain the continuous importance of gold, we draw on insights from social psychology and new materialist theories. We argue that international monetary relations should be understood as a complex assemblage of material artifacts, institutions, ideas, and practices. For much of its history, this assemblage revolved around the pivotal practice of referencing money to gold. The centrality of gold as experienced by policymakers had important effects. Using archival and other evidence, we document these effects from the 1944 Bretton Woods conference through the transition to floating exchange rates in the mid-1970s; most IPE scholars underestimate the role of gold during this period. Power relations and economic ideas were obviously important, but they contributed little to a fundamental development: the long process of reluctantly coming to terms with the limitations of specie-backed currency, and the progressive and still ongoing decentering of gold in international monetary relations.

What Did Central Banks Learn from Financial Crises?

During the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007–2009 and the currentCovid-19 debacle, central banks acted quickly, boldly, and effectively. The paper argues that they did so thanks to the lessons learned from the past financial crises, which provided them with opportunities to reconsider their previous beliefs. A case in point is the banking crisis in the United States during the Great Depression of the 1930s that taught central banks to act rapidly and decisively in order to prevent an initial liquidity crisis from escalating into a solvency crisis leading to bankruptcies of banks with potentially disastrous consequences for the entire economy. The paper revisits the consequences of the currency crises of the 1990s, which transformed exchange rate regimes across the world: the EMS one of 1992–1993 that accelerated the launch of the euro, and the Asian one of 1997–1998 resulted in the proliferation of floating exchange rates in emerging economies.

Long-memory modeling and forecasting: evidence from the U.S. historical series of inflation

We report the results of applying several long-memory models to the historical monthly U.S. inflation rate series and analyze their out-of-sample forecasting performance over different horizons. We find that the time-varying approach to estimating inflation persistence outperforms the models that assume a constant long-memory process. In addition, we examine the link between inflation persistence and exchange rate regimes. Our results support the hypothesis that floating exchange rates associate with increased inflation persistence. This finding, however, is less pronounced during the era of the Great Moderation and the Federal Reserve System’s commitment to inflation targeting.

Estimated Policy Rules for Capital Controls

This paper borrows the tradition of estimating policy reaction functions from monetary policy literature to ask whether capital controls respond to macroprudential or mercantilist motivations. I explore this question using a novel, weekly dataset on capital control actions in 21 emerging economies from 2001 to 2015. I introduce a new proxy for mercantilist motivations: the weighted appreciation of an emerging-market currency against its top five trade competitors. This proxy Granger causes future net initiations of non-tariff barriers in most countries. Emerging markets systematically respond to both mercantilist and macroprudential motivations. Policymakers respond to trade competitiveness concerns by using both instruments—inflow tightening and outflow easing. They use only inflow tightening in response to macroprudential concerns. Policy is acyclical to foreign debt; however, high levels of this debt reduces countercyclicality to mercantilist concerns. Higher exchange rate pass-through to export prices, and having an inflation targeting regime with non-freely floating exchange rates, increase responsiveness to mercantilist concerns.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Budget Expenditure Policy

The article discusses opportunities for improving fiscal policy in order to ensure macroeconomic stability and sustainable growth of the Russian economy. Budget expenditures have several key macroeconomic goals, the quality of which determines the effectiveness of budget spending policies. The authors developed a methodology that allows evaluating changes in the efficiency of budget expenditures based on a set of indicators. The estimates are based on the Russian Federation as the example, with special attention paid to the implementation of a balanced budget policy over the past decade. In Russia, significant progress has been made in ensuring macroeconomic stability through the introduction of flexible mechanisms for macroeconomic regulation (budget rules and floating exchange rates). However, when planning budget expenditures, additional attention should be paid to ensuring long-term economic growth and inclusive development, the structure of expenditures adjusted in accordance with these priorities. In the final part of the article, we consider changes in budget policy that have become a response to the crisis situation caused by the coronavirus pandemic. It is concluded that an increase in public debt may be appropriate in the current economic conditions in the event of a qualitative improvement in the budget spending policy.

Exchange Rate Policies and Economic Development

While traditional economic literature often sees nominal variables as irrelevant for the real economy, there is a vast body of analytical and empirical economic work that recognizes that, to the extent they exert a critical influence on the macroeconomic environment through a multiplicity of channels, exchange rate policies (ERP) have important consequences for development. ERP influences economic development in various ways: through its incidence on real variables such as investment and growth (and growth volatility) and on nominal aspects such relative prices or financial depth that, in turn, affect output growth or income distribution, among other development goals. Additionally, ERP, through the expected distribution of the real exchange rate indirectly, influences dimensions such as trade or financial fragility and explains, at least partially, the adoption of the euro—an extreme case of a fixed exchange rate arrangement—or the preference for floating exchange rates in the absence of financial dollarization. Importantly, exchange rate pegs have been (and, in many countries, still are) widely used as a nominal anchor to contain inflation in economies where nominal volatility induces agents to use the exchange rate as an implicit unit of account. All of these channels have been reflected to varying degrees in the choice of exchange rate regimes in recent history. The empirical literature on the consequences of ERP has been plagued by definitional and measurement problems. Whereas few economists would contest the textbook definition of canonical exchange rate regimes (fixed regimes involve a commitment to keep the nominal exchange rate at a given level; floating regimes imply no market intervention by the monetary authorities), reality is more nuanced: Pure floats are hard to find, and the empirical distinction between alternative flexible regimes is not always clear. Moreover, there are many different degrees of exchange rate commitments as well as many alternative anchors, sometimes undisclosed. Finally, it is not unusual that a country that officially declares to peg its currency realigns its parity if it finds the constraints on monetary policy or economic activity too taxing. By the same token, a country that commits to a float may choose to intervene in the foreign exchange market to dampen exchange rate fluctuations. The regime of choice depends critically on the situation of each country at a given point in time as much as on the evolution of the global environment. Because both the ERP debate and real-life choices incorporate national and time-specific aspects that tend to evolve over time, so does the changing focus of the debate. In the post-World War II years, under the Bretton Woods agreement, most countries pegged their currencies to the U.S. dollar, which in turn was kept convertible to gold. In the post-Bretton Woods years, after August 1971 when the United States abandoned unilaterally the convertibility of the dollar, thus bringing the Bretton Woods system to an end, the individual choices of ERP were intimately related to the global and local historical contexts, according to whether policy prioritized the use of the exchange rate as a nominal anchor (in favor of pegged or superfixed exchange rates, with dollarization or the launch of the euro as two extreme examples), as a tool to enhance price competitiveness (as in export-oriented developing countries like China in the 2000s) or as a countercyclical buffer (in favor of floating regimes with limited intervention, the prevalent view in the developed world). Similarly, the declining degree of financial dollarization, combined with the improved quality of monetary institutions, explain the growing popularity of inflation targeting with floating exchange rates in emerging economies. Finally, a prudential leaning-against-the-wind intervention to counter mean reverting global financial cycles and exchange rate swings motivates a more active—and increasingly mainstream—ERP in the late 2000s. The fact that most medium and large developing economies (and virtually all industrial ones) revealed in the 2000s a preference for exchange rate flexibility simply reflects this evolution. Is the combination of inflation targeting (IT) and countercyclical exchange rate intervention a new paradigm? It is still too early to judge. On the one hand, pegs still represent more than half of the IMF reporting countries—particularly, small ones—indicating that exchange rate anchors are still favored by small open economies that give priority to the trade dividend of stable exchange rates and find the conduct of an autonomous monetary policy too costly, due to lack of human capital, scale, or an important non-tradable sector. On the other hand, the work and the empirical evidence on the subject, particularly after the recession of 2008–2009, highlight a number of developments in the way advanced and emerging economies think of the impossible trinity that, in a context of deepening financial integration, casts doubt on the IT paradigm, places the dilemma between nominal and real stability back on the forefront, and postulates an IT 2.0, which includes selective exchange rate interventions as a workable compromise. At any rate, the exchange rate debate is still alive and open.

Capital Controls: The Emergency Brakes

Chapter 10 relates the fall and rise and fall of international capital mobility, a centerpiece of neoliberal policy. Immediately after World War II, the Bretton Woods System established fixed exchange rates and regulated the international movement of capital to facilitate trade and preserve domestic policy capacity. Owners of capital mobilized institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in a decades-long struggle for international capital mobility. Their moment came with a crisis in the Bretton Woods System in the early 1970s, and the era of floating exchange rates and international capital mobility was born. Since its ascension, international capital mobility has been a flashpoint for crisis. Facing criticism for the frequency of financial crises, especially after the deep European crisis beginning in 2010, some parts of the IMF have broken with institutional orthodoxy. The rupture suggests potential for a broader break with the principles of neoliberal governance.