“World Bank Chief Economist Justin Yifu Lin staked out a strong position against forcing China to let its currency appreciate as a way to rebalance the world economy.

“’Currency appreciation in China won’t help this imbalance and can deter the global recovery,’ he said in a lecture Monday at Hong Kong University.

“In an interview after the lecture, he said other countries shouldn’t intervene to keep their currencies cheap to boost their export sectors, calling it the ‘equivalent of protectionism.’”

You can read the rest at Real Time Economics. No, it doesn’t make more sense — except possibly as an expression of China’s policy.

By James Kwak

To date, we haven’t seen much in the way of higher trade barriers during this crisis, although you could argue that some bailouts constitute subsidies favoring local over foreign companies. Instead, however, we are seeing friction over currency valuations. If you want to boost your net exports but don’t want to do the obviously unfriendly thing and increase tariffs, the other option is to devalue your currency: a weaker currency increases the price of imported goods and reduces the price of exported goods, hence reducing imports and increasing exports.

Yesterday, Tim Geithner accused China of “manipulating its currency,” something we’ve heard periodically over the last several years but not in much in the last few months. (Of course, Geithner then said that “a strong dollar is in America’s national interest,” whatever that means.)  Switzerland threatened to intervene on foreign exchange markets to suppress the value of the Swiss franc. And the French finance minister criticized the U.K. for letting the pound depreciate. (Hat tip Macro Man for the last two.)

Theoretically, devaluing your currency is not as bad as import tariffs. If every country tries to devalue its currency at the same time, exchange rates will remain the same; this is a zero-sum game in that sense. It’s a little more complicated, because there are at least two ways of devaluing your currency. One is for the central government to sell its own currency and buy everyone else’s currency on the foreign exchange market. The other, however, is to run an expansionary monetary policy (lower interest rates, more money creation, etc.), which is inflationary. So one possible outcome is that every country runs an expansionary monetary policy, exchange rates remain the same, but commodity prices go up because there is more money floating around. In today’s environment of low or negative inflation expectations, however, that might not be such a terrible thing.

But the other side of competitive currency devaluations is that not all countries are equally well armed. In particular, countries that use the euro cannot devalue their currencies, because they don’t control their monetary policy and they don’t have the scale to intervene significantly on the market for euros. In short, other countries can devalue their currencies at the expense of Eurozone members. This is one of the reasons why, as we (and Martin Feldstein) have warned, the economic crisis will increase tensions within the Eurozone. The New York Times just ran an article on this exact topic:

Germany, France and the Scandinavian countries are mounting billion-dollar stimulus plans and erecting fences to protect their banks. But the peripheral economies are being left to twist in the market winds.

This is a good indicator that fears about the Eurozone are going mainstream.

(Thanks to Free Exchange for catching this.)

On the topic of regulation and economic stimulus, Mark Thoma cites and expands on Larry Summers, who argues that we need to not just give the economy a boost in the short term, but take advantage of the opportunity to take steps – both investments and regulation – to boost productivity in the long term.

Mark Thoma (again) and Yves Smith both provide roundups and analysis of the currency crisis, which Simon raised a couple of days ago. Quick summary: it could be bad.

So if you can’t sleep, there’s plenty to read and worry about. (Or you could watch the World Series.)

The G7 needs to slow down the disorderly run into the dollar.  This run is in danger of snowballing into a panic - as people fear further rises in the dollar (and falls in their local currency), they rush to buy more dollars (to cover debts in dollars and also to shift their portfolios), and so on.

Coordinated intervention, announced over the weekend most likely, will involve selling dollars, selling yen, buying euros and pounds.  This can calm things, by showing there are no one way bets.  (Will the Chinese be involved?)

But the global deleveraging (reduction in lending worldwide) will continue.  And this seems to involve more of a move into dollars that we previously thought.  So how long can even the most coordinated intervention hold the line?

Update: Typo fixed to clean up an inconsistency. Sorry for any confusion.