Managing the Dollar Over Its Cycles

The United States has ceded to the rest of the world managing the dollar’s value. For a generation, the U.S. authorities have all but withdrawn from the foreign exchange market. Yet the dollar does not float freely as a result of this hands-off U.S. policy. Instead, other authorities manage the dollar exchange rates, albeit separately. These authorities make heavier purchases of dollars in its downswings than in the upswings, damping its decline. Thus, the Fed finds that accommodative monetary policy transmits less to U.S. manufacturing and traded services, and relies on still lower rates to stimulate interest-sensitive housing and auto demand. The current U.S. dollar policy of naming and shaming surplus-running countries accumulating foreign exchange reserves does not seem to work. Three alternatives warrant consideration. First, the U.S. could reinstate its withholding tax on interest income received by non-residents and even add policy criteria to bilateral tax treaties. Second, the U.S. authorities could retaliate by selling dollars against the currencies of dollar-buying jurisdictions running chronic surpluses. However, either the withholding tax or such retaliatory foreign exchange intervention pose huge practical challenges. Third, the U.S. authorities could re-enter the foreign exchange market, making large-scale asset purchases in foreign currency when the dollar rises sharply against its average value. Such a policy would encourage private investment in U.S. traded goods and service production. The challenge is to set ex ante foreign exchange intervention rules to guide market participants’ expectations, even positioning them to do the authorities’ work.

Dirty float or clean intervention? The Bank of England in the foreign exchange market

The effectiveness of central bank intervention is debated and despite literature showing mixed results, central banks regularly intervene in the foreign exchange market, both in developing and developed economies. Does foreign exchange intervention work? Using over 60,000 new daily observations on intervention and exchange rates, this paper is the first study of the Bank of England’s foreign exchange intervention between 1952 and 1972. The main finding is that the Bank of England was unsuccessful in managing a credible exchange rate over that period. Running an event study, I demonstrate that betting systematically against the Bank of England would have been a profitable trading strategy. Pressures increased in the 1960s and the Bank eventually manipulated the publication of its reserve figures to avoid a run on sterling.

How Powerful Is Unannounced, Sterilized Foreign Exchange Intervention?

Though most central banks actively intervene on the foreign exchange market, the literature offers mixed evidence on their effectiveness: particularly for unannounced interventions. We use new, declassified data from the archives of the Bank of England and the institutional features of the Bretton Woods era to estimate the effects of intervention on the exchange rate. We find that a purchase of pounds equivalent to 1% of the money supply causes a statistically significant, 4-5 basis point appreciation in the pound.

Foreign Exchange Intervention

Foreign exchange intervention (FXI) is a highly debated topic. Yet, comprehensive and comparable data on FXI is hard to find. This paper provides a new dataset of FXI covering a large number of countries over the period 2000-20 at monthly and quarterly frequencies. It includes publicly available data for about 40 countries and carefully constructed proxies for 122 countries. Proxies are focused on both spot and derivative transactions that alter the central bank’s foreign currency position and account for a wide range of central bank operations, including vis-à-vis residents, the first proxy to do so to our knowledge. The paper discusses the merits of the new proxy relative to coarser measures traditionally used like the change in reserves, and potential definitional differences with published data. The paper also presents stylized facts using our newly constructed FXI proxies.

Foreign Exchange Intervention Rules for Central Banks

This paper presents a rule for foreign exchange interventions (FXI), designed to preserve financial stability in floating exchange rate arrangements. The FXI rule addresses a market failure: the absence of hedging solution for tail exchange rate risk in the market (i.e. high volatility). Market impairment or overshoot of exchange rate between two equilibria could generate high volatility and threaten financial stability due to unhedged exposure to exchange rate risk in the economy. The rule uses the concept of Value at Risk (VaR) to define FXI triggers. While it provides to the market a hedge against tail risk, the rule allows the exchange rate to smoothly adjust to new equilibria. In addition, the rule is budget neutral over the medium term, encourages a prudent risk management in the market, and is more resilient to speculative attacks than other rules, such as fixed-volatility rules. The empirical methodology is backtested on Banco Mexico’s FXIs data between 2008 and 2016.