The Future of Global Finance

  Excerpts of the original NY Times article by LIAQUAT AHAMED   The build-up of dollars abroad transformed the United States into a gigantic bank, and like any bank, it was vulnerable to a run . It has long been recognized that the global financial structure — built as it is around the dollar as the world’s reserve currency — has a fundamental design flaw that makes it inherently unstable. The problem was first identified back in the early 1960s by the Belgian-American economist Robert Triffin, in “ Gold and the Dollar Crisis .” Writing about Europe’s accumulation of dollars, he argued that the system carried the seeds of its own destruction. Foreigners could acquire dollars only if the United States ran current account deficits — that is, spent more than it earned. But lending money to someone who lives beyond his means has obvious dangers, and the same is true of countries. Thus, the American deficits necessary to supply dollars to the world for international transactions simultaneously undermined confidence in the currency. It was only a matter of time, Triffin predicted, before the system would be hit by a crisis — which it duly was in the early 1970s. In the wake of the 1997 financial crisis there, countries in East Asia set out to build up war chests of dollars as insurance against domestic banking runs or downturns in the global economy. At about the same time, China embarked on a program of export-led growth, engineered by keeping its currency artificially low. Interpretations of what happened next differ. Some argue that to absorb these goods from abroad while avoiding unemployment at home, the United States very consciously stimulated consumer demand. The country, in effect, was forced to live beyond its means. Others believe that the Fed misread the fall in prices as a symptom of inadequate demand rather than for what it was — an astounding, once-in-a-generation expansion in the supply of low-cost goods — and kept interest rates low for an unusually long time, which provoked the real estate bubble . In either case, the result was an enormous accumulation of dollars in the hands of Asian central banks. Those dollars, when invested in the American bond market, drove long-term interest rates even further down and made credit in the ­United States even more artificially cheap. The build-up of dollars abroad was also the catalyst for a remarkable transformation in the flow of money around the world. The United States…