Beggar-thy-neighbor

Barry Eichengreen, el gurú de la historia económica, aclara muchas cosas sobre la falta de coordinación de las políticas monetarias expansivas actuales.



Los "Casandras" dicen que está políticas introducen una mayor volatilidad e incertidumbre a través de los mercados cambiarios; como sucedió en los años treinta del siglo pasado, en que las "devaluaciones competitivas" anularon las intenciones expansivas de los bancos centrales, pisandose unos a otros en los pies.

Lo que dice Eichengreen es que el 1930 los bancos centrarles fracasaron por otras razones:

Subsequent scholarship shows, however, that the main reason monetary policy didn’t work more powerfully in the 1930s was that it wasn’t tried (apologies to E. Cary Brown). As I have argued here, central banks in the 1930s were reluctant to utilise their newfound monetary freedom. They were uncomfortable about making policy without an exchange rate anchor. They feared an outbreak of uncontrollable inflation even in what was a deeply deflationary environment.

Because, in this deflationary environment, they failed to make open-ended commitments to raise prices, they failed to effectively transform expectations. Because they failed to supplement the new monetary regime with supportive fiscal action, they failed to convince investors that they were committed to a fundamentally new policy regime. Because they hesitated to expand domestic credit more aggressively, they ended up relying on net exports as a way of supporting domestic demand, as argued here. And because they failed to coordinate their monetary and exchange rate policies internationally, haphazard exchange rate changes only created volatility and uncertainty, as argued here.

Es decir, los bancos centrales de entonces intentaron sólo incentivar las exportaciones, pero esterilizando el aumento de divisas para no aumentar el crédito interno, por miedo a los efectos inflacionistas. No fueron convincentes en su voluntad de permitir mayor inflación, mientras que el intento de todos en devaluar se anulaban entre si. Y, sobre todo, no fueron capaces de coordinarse entre sí.
Hay un error de partida en la valoración de esta política: se da por hecho que no funcionó en 1930 porque era una política de mejorar a costa del vencino (beggar-thy-neighbor), pero eso no tiene por que ser así. Si todos los bancos centrales intentan al mismo tiempo una política expansiva que deprecia su tipo de cambio, efectivamente se anulan las ventajas de la devaluación, pero la expansión monetaria se extiende a todos los países que la necesitan. Lo que se pierde de impulso de exportaciones por devaluación se gana por la expansión de la demanda interna de los demás países, así como ellos ganan con la expansión de la demanda interna del país restante.

En Eichengreen & Sachs se explica por qué las políticas monetarias dubitativas no funcionaron,

Currency depreciation in the 1930 is almost universally dismissed or condemned. This paper advances a different interpretation of these policies. It documents first that depreciation benefited the initiating countries.It shows next that there can be no presumption that depreciation was beggar-thy-neighbor. While empirical analysis indicates that the foreign repercussions of individual devaluations were in fact negative,it does not implyt hat competitive devaluations taken by a group of countries were without mutual benefit.To the contrary, similar policies, had they been even more widely adopted and coordinated internationally, would have hastened recovery from the Great Depression.