Competitive devaluation has been the central bankers’ conventional response to emergent financial and economic problems. It seems part of their operating manual. And Asian central bankers have been engaging in the same inflationism as with their crisis affected Western counterparts.
From the Wall Street Journal, (bold emphasis mine)
Is anyone really surprised inflation in South Korea has hit a three-year high? They shouldn't be. Seoul is, like so many other East Asian governments, in large part a victim of economic policies hatched in Washington. Yet Korean policy makers seem to be doing everything they can to make their monetary problems worse.
The government was quick to blame last week's price-rise data—up 5.3% for August compared to the same month last year—on that old inflationary whipping boy, the weather. Summer flooding supposedly depressed agriculture supplies and pushed food prices higher. Perhaps that even explains part of it.
But alarm bells also should be ringing over energy prices. The consumer inflation data included increases of between 2% and 10% on various oil and gas products as the government scales back increasingly unaffordable subsidies. No Korean oil fields were flooded since there aren't any Korean oil fields to flood. Clearly something bigger than Mother Nature is afoot.
Such as monetary policy, both in the U.S. and in Korea. Korea has been hit by the same dollar tidal wave the Federal Reserve has unleashed on the rest of the world. These inflows have caused inflation spikes all over, with consumer price rises of nearly 4.5% in Thailand, more than 3% in Malaysia, above 5% in Singapore and so forth in recent months. A weak-dollar policy out of Washington inevitably strains everyone else in what still is the Asian dollar bloc.
Korea, however, has managed to make matters worse by attempting a form of competitive devaluation of the won on the sly. Dollar inflows have also sparked currency appreciations in most corners of Asia, with the yen (up 17.5% vis-à-vis the dollar since January 2010), Singapore dollar (14%) and Thai baht (10%) leading the pack.
But in Seoul, the central bank has refrained from raising interest rates that are still negative after accounting for inflation, despite unsustainably robust growth and mounting evidence of rising prices. Data on foreign-exchange reserve accumulation over the past two years also suggest the government may be quietly buying dollars and selling won, although the government denies this.
Political authorities, adapting the mercantilist view, have been averse to see their currencies appreciate, so their common response has been to resort to the beggar thy neighbor approach of inflating the system.
The five year chart of the South Korean won (from yahoo). The won has not recovered from the 2008 collapse relative to the US dollar.
The race to destroy currencies has been the principal reason why gold prices will continue to blossom.
No comments:
Post a Comment