EDWARD HADAS: Why the next financial crisis will be about forex
'A flight from a reserve currency would throw the global trading system into disarray'
For centuries, cross-border trade has come with a currency problem. The expansion of globalisation has not made it any less pressing. The dilemma identified by the economist Robert Triffin is a powerful – and alarmingly current – reminder that a worldwide foreign exchange crisis is only one big mood change away. The Scottish philosopher and economist David Hume identified the fundamental issue in 1752. While the sum of global exports always equals global imports, countries can run persistent trade deficits. In Hume’s time, the deficit country shipped gold to pay for overseas goods. Today, creditors have to accept large quantities of deficit countries’ currency. the net U.S. international investment position – basically the market value of dollars invested from America minus the value of dollars lent to it – first turned negative in 1988. After some gyrations, a firm trend has set in. By 2016, the deficit had reached around 11 percent of global GDP. That is an awful lot of dollar val...
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