风萧萧_Frank
以文会友
尼尔·弗格森：“逐渐地，然后突然地”，美元会这样崩溃吗？
尼尔 弗格森 美国斯坦福大学胡佛研究所高级研究员 2023-05-02 观察者网
【文/尼尔·弗格森，译/刘啸云】
“我每晚都要扪心自问，为什么每个国家都必须以美元进行贸易？……为何在金本位制度之后是‘美元本位’，这是由谁决定的？……各国本可以用各自的货币结算进出口贸易，但现在所有国家都必须使用美元。”
4月13日，在位于上海的新开发银行，巴西总统路易斯·伊纳西奥·卢拉·达席尔瓦提出了上述问题，这一新闻引起了巴西民众的广泛关注。然而，在我看来，卢拉提出的问题根本称不上“新”闻——无独有偶，半个多世纪前，另一位总统这样说道：
“美元作为一种国际货币，被赋予了超越性的价值……许多国家接收美元……以弥补美国国际收支的赤字，这使美国能够无偿地向他国借贷。美国人以美元偿还外债，而美元是他们可以任意印制发行的……这种机制只对美国单方有利……美元被广泛视作公正的国际交易（媒介），但事实上，其只是一种独属于美国的信贷手段。”
以上文字的作者是1965年2月4日的时任法国总统戴高乐。戴高乐激烈抨击美元体系，其外长瓦列里·吉斯卡尔·德斯坦（Valéry Giscard d'Estaing）提出了“过度特权”一词，以表达法国对美元霸权的不满。
戴高乐对美元的“过度特权”表示不满（图源：金融时报）
换言之，在财经新闻领域，对美元霸权的微词早已是老生常谈。谷歌数据显示，“过度特权”一词的使用频率在2007年、2011年和2014年屡次达到峰值；“去美元化”等词的使用频率也有着类似的规律。
我首次涉及该话题是在20年前。2004年6月，我偶然为《新共和》杂志撰稿，稿件主题为“欧洲货币一体化能否动摇美元的主导地位”。
当时，我对美元的未来并不乐观：“对美国而言，最重要的问题在于：美元标准究竟能延续多久？只要美元升值，美国就可以对巨额的贸易赤字和预算赤字听之任之，无需担忧其造成重大经济影响；然而，一旦美国丧失了其作为世界储备货币的地位且急剧贬值，后果将非常严重。不幸的是，美国收支的严重失衡，以及合适替代品（即欧元）的出现，使第二种情况的可能性与日俱增。”
所幸，我在写下以上这段话时没有赌咒发誓。
因此，当我再次听闻唱衰美元的论调时，我的第一反应是质疑。但是，持这种观点的不只是卢拉，还包括一大批颇具声望的经济评论家。美国经济研究所的彼得·C·厄尔（Peter C. Earle）表示：“长期来看，美元作为世界通用货币的使命已经结束了。”
厄尔认为，造成美元衰落的罪魁祸首是美政府对金融制裁的滥用。美国越倾向于将对手排除在美元支付体系之外，其他国家就越无法信任美元体系，从而致力于规避风险。近日，中国和巴西、中国和法国、印度和马来西亚分别达成协议，在双边贸易中以彼此的货币进行结算。
近日，吉莉安·泰特（Gillian Tett）在英国《金融时报》上发表文章，呼吁大家“做好准备，面对货币多极化的世界”。本月上旬，俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔·普京向中国承诺，将以人民币结算俄罗斯与亚非拉国家的贸易，从而减少“有毒的”美元资产。
英国对冲基金Eurizon SLJ Capital首席执行官斯蒂芬·詹（Stephen Jen）指出，上述趋势使美元“遭受了惊人的崩溃”。罗宾·里格尔斯沃思（Robin Wrigglesworth）在《金融时报》上详细援引了斯蒂芬·詹的研究报告：“美国正丧失其作为储备货币的地位，速度之快，颇为出人意料。究其原因，或许是由于俄乌冲突后，美国冻结了俄罗斯的外汇储备，此举构成了对他国财产权的威胁，从而引发了各国恐慌。2022年，我们见证了各国从‘世界警察’处撤资的时刻。”
此言非虚，但19年前欧元对美元的贬值也是如此。所以，我们需对数据进行更细致的分析。按照传统标准，美国目前在国际储备中所占份额（59%）确实小于1999年（逾70%）；然而，外交关系委员会成员布拉德·赛斯特（Brad Setser）指出，如果将统计图的X轴向前延长至1995年，就会发现，美元目前在国际储备中所占份额高于当年。
美元在国际储备中所占比重历年变化（图源：彭博社）
无论如何，自上世纪90年代以来，世界货币市场已发生了一个重大变化：欧元在储备货币、国际债务、国际贷款、外汇交易和全球支付等领域均成为了第二受欢迎的货币（如果我在2004年就预测到这一点，会显得更为聪明，但这也会使此事显得更加无趣而不值一提）；并在上述每一个领域（尤其是全球支付领域）推出了数字欧元。
欧元国家和美国一样实施了对俄金融制裁，这大大削弱了“美国滥用金融制裁导致美元衰落”这一观点的说服力。诚如赛斯特所言，即便考虑到主权财富基金对外汇的积累，俄乌冲突及由此导致的对俄金融制裁也并未对储备货币的份额分配产生明显影响。事实上，中国还增持了由美国联邦住房管理局、政府国家抵押贷款协会等发行的所谓“美国政府机构债券”。
上周，Spectra Markets的布伦特·唐纳利（Brent Donnelly）通过分析国际清算银行的统计数据指出，相较于其他主流货币，美元依然享有特权，在全球交易中占据较多份额。自1989年至今，国际清算银行每隔3年进行一次统计，在每一次统计中，美元都占据了全球交易份额的80%至90%，且并无下滑趋势。
人民币在国际储备中所占份额仍然很小，原因很简单——“资本管制”四个字足以说明一切。迈克尔·尼科莱托斯（Michael Nicoletos）辩称，若无资本管制，大量资本将为了追求多元化和安全性而流出中国——早在十年前，英格兰银行就已在一篇论文中提出了类似观点，但并未引起关注。在这一反事实条件下，人民币将大幅贬值。
对此，前财政部长拉里·萨默斯于2019年做出了精辟点评：“若想取代美元，就必须给出可行的替代品。当欧洲是博物馆，日本是疗养院，而比特币尚且停留于实验阶段时，还有什么货币比美元更适合作为储备货币和贸易货币吗？”
如果你（像我一样）由衷喜欢美元及类似事物，或许也会赞同彭博社记者泰勒·考恩（Tyler Cowen）和约翰·亚瑟（John Authers）的观点。前者认为，外国人就是喜欢那些雕刻凹印着美国国父头像和共济会古老符号的绿色纸片；后者则认为，“短中取长，美元仍是最合适的国际货币，因此‘去美元化’根本没有发生。”
人们常说，我们生活在一个瞬息万变的世界中。但是，半个世纪来，有一事从未改变——美元是占主导地位的货币（这令许多外国领导人深感不满）。既然如此，为何经济学家和金融记者每隔6-7年就要唱衰美元呢？
当然，纵观历史，确有很多事物多年不改，而后于旦夕之间面目全非，正因如此，历史才显得难以预测。诚如海明威《太阳照常升起》中的一段对话：
比尔：“你是怎样破产的？”
迈克：“逐渐地，然后突然地。”
然而，没有任何依据表明，储备货币也会以类似的方式走向衰落。从“英镑主导”至“美元主导”的转变是一个由1931年至今的渐进过程，间或伴随着约十年一次的英镑危机。尽管如此，时至今日，英镑仍在全球储备中占据了5%的份额。英镑与美元的竞争是一场漫长的角逐。
因此，我们需要寻找蛛丝马迹，以判断当今世界是否正处于类似的渐进过程中。上世纪90年代，欧元创立，随后在储备货币竞赛中赢得亚军；而今，种种迹象表明，人民币正在积蓄力量，预备于2043年超越日元和英镑，在新一轮储备货币竞赛中跻身前三。
伯克利经济史学家巴利·艾森格林等人近日发表论文，称“人民币可通过非常规途径，获得储备货币地位”。他们认为，中国无需全面实行金融自由化（包括开放资本账户），即可使人民币成为国际货币。
其一，央行货币互换协议激增，使各国“有信心从中国央行处获得人民币”。其二，离岸人民币市场扩大，“使央行储备经理和其他投资者相信人民币兑美元的汇率是稳定而可预测的”。
在上述两个方面，中国均取得了令人瞩目的进展。2009年至今，中国央行（即中国人民银行）已与至少39家央行达成双边货币互换协议，总额高达3.7万亿元人民币（约合5500亿美元）。自2010年香港首次获准人民币交易以来，离岸市场在全球24个城市如雨后春笋般涌现。至2021 年7月，离岸人民币存款已达1.25万亿（约合2000亿美元），仍然难望美元项背，但已小有所成。
同时，正如霍恩（Horn）等人所言，中国已成为国际上的最终贷款人，“构建了一种新型全球体系，向深陷债务困境的国家提供跨境救援贷款。”
近年来，中国已为20余个国家提供了超1700亿美元的流动性支持，包括对即将到期的互换反复延期。中国国有银行和企业额外发放了700亿美元的救助贷款，用于支持国际收支。中国的救助总计相当于过去十年国际货币基金组织贷款总额的20%以上。
霍恩等人将之概述为“一带一路救助”。他们指出，得到救助资金的国家往往是“一带一路”倡议的成员。相较于西方国家提供的类似贷款，中国的贷款包含更高的利息。
凡是严肃的历史研究，无不致力于识别典型范式。以上两篇论文的作者都在历史中发现了相似的范式。“今天的人民币，正如上世纪50-60年代的美元”，艾森格林等人表示，“如今人民币-美元的自由兑换受限于资本账户管制，正如当年美元-黄金的自由兑换受限于布雷顿森林体系下的美国货币法。在布雷顿森林体系维系的数十年间，美元与黄金挂钩，但不可在美国境内兑换为金属。国际货币（当年的美元和今天的人民币）难以完全兑换为最终储备资产（当年的黄金和今天的美元），这一现象催生了当年伦敦的离岸黄金市场和今天的离岸人民币市场”。
霍恩等人还指出，“今天的局势，与当年美国开始崛起为全球金融大国的时代（尤其是20世纪30年代及二战之后）颇为相似。当时，美国通过进出口银行、外汇稳定基金和美联储，向对美国银行和出口商负有巨额债务的国家提供纾困基金。这些临时行为随着时间推移而发展为一种久经考验的全球危机管理体系。中国可能也会走上类似的道路。”
这些论文使我意识到，早在上世纪80-90年代之前，美国就已经占据了全球主导地位。其表现之一就是，美国成为了国际上的最终贷款人。
美元之所以能逐渐取代英镑，也是因为美国拥有更为先进的金融技术。今天的中国取得了类似的优势：中国在线支付平台的规模一骑绝尘，遥遥领先于西方。正如斯坦福大学的达雷尔·达菲（Darrell Duffie）所言，中国最值得关注的并非备受吹嘘的央行数字货币（e-CNY），而是支付宝——其交易量较前者多出三个数量级，且已拥有庞大的国际业务，包括220万美国用户。
同时，今天美国政府的赤字远超20年前，且美联储一直致力于将其货币化。2004年，美联储的资产负债仅占美国GDP的6%；而今，历经数轮量化宽松等干预措施，这一比例飙升至35%。2021-2023年美国通胀率的激增，在很大程度上应归咎于财政和货币政策的重大失误。如果美国有意于维持其在全球货币市场中的主导地位的话，我只能说美国将自己的意图掩盖得很好。
上述因素导致美元黄金价格在近五年间飙升50%以上，而美国国债却下跌了8%。约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯曾对金本位制做出著名的批评，称其为“野蛮的遗迹”，但是，无息资产的表现优于有息资产并非野蛮的象征。根据世界黄金协会的最新数据，在世界官方持有的黄金中，30%属于欧元区，23%属于美国，而中俄合计仅占12%。
但是，2002-2023年间，黄金的最大买主是俄罗斯（1876公吨）和中国（1525吨），土耳其、印度和哈萨克斯坦落于其后。同期最大卖家则是欧元区（1726吨）和瑞士（1158吨），英语国家则仅仅出售了87吨。
【本文译自《每月评论》（Monthly Review）】
The Dollar's Demise May Come Gradually, But Not Suddenly
Rumors of the death of the US currency are as exaggerated as they are frequently repeated.
The president in question was Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and the venue was the New Development Bank in Shanghai on April 13. There was a great deal of interest in this latest news about Lula when I visited Sao Paulo last week. To me, however, the striking thing was how un-new it was. Lula’s words immediately brought to my mind the musings of another president more than half a century ago:
The convention whereby the dollar is given a transcendent value as an international currency no longer rests on its initial base. … The fact that many states accept dollars … in order to make up for the deficits of [the] American balance of payments, has enabled the United States to be indebted to foreign countries free of charge. Indeed, what they owe those countries, they pay … in dollars that they themselves can issue as they wish. … This unilateral facility attributed to America has helped spread the idea that the dollar is an impartial, international [means] of exchange, whereas it is a means of credit appropriated to one state.
The speaker then was President Charles de Gaulle of France, and the date was Feb. 4, 1965. It was de Gaulle’s broadside against the dollar that prompted his finance minister, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, to coin the memorable phrase “exorbitant privilege,” which encapsulated the French complaint.
Being fed up with the dominance of the mighty dollar is, in other words, old hat. Indeed, it is such a recurrent theme of financial journalism that one can identify cycles in the use of the phrase “exorbitant privilege.” Recent peaks, according to Google, were in 2007, 2011 and 2014. The Google “Ngram” for “de-dollarization” follows a similar path.
first wrote an article on the subject nearly two decades ago, in June 2004. I was then an occasional contributor to The New Republic and my theme was the grave challenge to dollar dominance posed by the creation of a single European currency.
“For the United States,” I wrote portentously, “the question is: How long can [the] dollar standard last? As long as the dollar is ascendant, the United States can continue to run huge trade deficits and budget deficits, without having to worry about serious economic fallout. But if the dollar were to lose its status as the world’s reserve currency, and suffer a more precipitous slide, that could have grave consequences. Unfortunately for Americans, the sheer magnitude of the imbalances, along with the emergence of suitable alternative — the Euro — have made this a distinct possibility.”
Fortunately for me, a man is not under oath when writing such stuff.
Readers will therefore understand why my initial response is one of skepticism to any new claims that the demise of the dollar is imminent. But here they come again — not just Lula but a cluster of widely respected economic commentators. According to Peter C. Earle of the American Institute for Economic Research, “the dollar’s fate as the lingua franca of world commerce over the long haul may already be sealed.”
For Earle, it is American overuse of financial sanctions that is to blame. The more the US exploits its power to shut adversaries’ economies out of the dollar payments system, the more other countries want to reduce their exposure to that risk. Hence recent agreements between China and Brazil, China and France, and India and Malaysia, to settle trades in one another’s currencies.
“Prepare for a multipolar currency world” was Gillian Tett’s message in a recent Financial Times piece. Earlier this month, while Chinese president Xi Jinping was in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged to adopt the renminbi for “payments between Russia and countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America” to reduce Russian exposure to “toxic” dollar-denominated assets.
Because of such trends, according to Stephen Jen of Eurizon SLJ Capital, the dollar has already “suffered a stunning collapse.” “The USD is losing its market share as a reserve currency at a much faster rate than is commonly believed,” Jen wrote in a recent research note quoted at length by Robin Wrigglesworth in the FT. “The main driver of the collapse in USD’s reserve status in 2022 may have reflected a panicked reaction to property rights being jeopardized” by the freezing of Russia’s foreign currency reserves following its invasion of Ukraine. “What we witnessed in 2022 was sort of a ‘defund-the-global-police’ moment.”
That’s a nice line, but so was the eurotrashing of the dollar 19 years ago. So, let’s take a closer look at the data. It’s true that, conventionally measured, the dollar now accounts for a smaller share of international reserves than it did in 1999 — down from just above 70% then to 59%. However, as Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations has pointed out, if you take the X-axis back to 1995, you can see that the dollar share of international reserves is higher today than it was back then.
The Dominant Dollar
Global foreign exchange reserves
In any case, the principal shift that has occurred since the 1990s is that the euro has become the world’s second-favorite reserve currency (which would have been a smarter but more boring and therefore less publishable thing for me to have predicted in 2004). The same goes for international debt issuance, international loans, foreign exchange turnover and global payments through Swift: In each domain (especially the last) the euro has clearly established itself as numero dos.
The fact that the euro area countries joined the US in imposing financial sanctions on Russia greatly weakens the argument that it is American overuse of sanctions that is undermining dollar dominance. As Setser notes, the invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions don’t seem to have had a discernible effect on reserve allocation, even when you take into account the various sovereign wealth funds, which also accumulate foreign currency assets. The Chinese have actually increased their holdings of so-called “agency” bonds issued by US government entities such as the Federal Housing Administration and the Government National Mortgage Association.
The clinching data point was provided last week by Brent Donnelly of Spectra Markets, who used Bank for International Settlements statistics to show that, when it comes to major currencies’ shares of global transactions, the dollar’s privilege is still exorbitant. Every three years since 1989, the BIS has put the dollar’s share at between 80% and 90%. There has been no downward trend.
It is not hard to explain why the Chinese renminbi remains such a small share of international reserves: “capital controls” are the only two words you need to say to end the discussion. As Michael Nicoletos recently argued, without capital controls, a very large amount of Chinese capital would leave the country in search of diversification and more secure property rights. The Bank of England made this point in a seldom-cited but excellent paper a decade ago. The counterfactual of a convertible renminbi is one of a significantly depreciated currency.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers had a good line about all this back in 2019. “You cannot replace something with nothing,” he said. What other currency is preferable to the dollar as a reserve and trade currency “when Europe’s a museum, Japan’s a nursing home, China’s a jail, and Bitcoin’s an experiment”?
If you are structurally long the dollar (as I am) and like that sort of thing (as I do), I can also recommend reassuring takes from my Bloomberg Opinion colleagues Tyler Cowen and John Authers. Foreigners just love our green-colored pieces of cloth with their rugged founders’ faces and their quaint masonic iconography, argues the former. “De-dollarization isn’t happening at all,” says the latter, because “the dollar is the cleanest dirty shirt.”
It is a cliché to say that we live in an ever-changing world. But if something doesn’t change for half a century — the dollar is the dominant currency and some foreign leaders resent that — why do economists and financial journalists keep predicting the demise of the dollar every six or seven years?
Of course, there are many things in history that stayed the same for 50 years and then suddenly changed. That is precisely what makes history hard to predict. It’s why people love to quote the exchange from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
But there is no basis for thinking that reserve currencies lose their status in anything resembling these ways. The transition from sterling dominance to dollar dominance was all gradual, even if it was punctuated by occasional sterling crises. Those happened roughly once a decade from 1931 until, well, last year. And despite all the crises, sterling still accounts for about 5% of global reserves. This is a tortoise race.
So what we need to look for are signs that another such gradual change could be getting underway. Just as the creation of the euro in the 1990s paved the way for a new silver medalist in the reserve-currency race, so — if you look closely — there are meaningful signs that the Chinese currency is gathering enough momentum to be a meaningful contender for bronze in, say, 2043, passing the yen and the pound.
In an important new paper, the Berkeley economic historian Barry Eichengreen and co-authors have called it “the renminbi’s unconventional route to reserve currency status.” Their argument is that China does not need full financial liberalization, including an open capital account, to increase the international use of its currency.
First, the rapid growth of central bank swap lines engenders “confidence that RMB can be obtained from the Chinese central bank.” Second, the proliferation of offshore renminbi markets “reassures central bank reserve managers and other investors that they can convert RMB into dollars at stable and predictable rates.”
The scale of both these developments is startling. Since around 2009, the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, has negotiated bilateral currency swap agreements totaling 3.7 trillion renminbi ($550 billion) with at least 39 central banks. Since 2010, when renminbi trading in Hong Kong was first authorized, offshore markets have sprung up in 24 other cities around the world. By July 2021, 1.25 trillion renminbi ($200 billion) was deposited in offshore accounts — an order of magnitude smaller than offshore dollar deposits, but not nothing.
At the same time, as another excellent new paper by Horn et al. shows, China has established itself as an international lender of last resort, launching “a new global system for cross-border rescue lending to countries in debt distress.”
In recent years, more than $170 billion in liquidity support has been extended to more than 20 countries, including repeated rollovers of swaps coming due. Chinese state-owned banks and enterprises have given out an additional $70 billion in rescue loans for balance-of-payments support. All told, China’s bailouts are equivalent to more than 20% of total International Monetary Fund lending over the past decade.
The authors sum their story up as “Bailouts on the Belt and Road,” noting that recipients of funds tend to be Belt and Road Initiative borrowers and that the interest rates they pay are relatively high compared with Western loans to countries in similar circumstances.
The serious study of history is all about pattern recognition. Both sets of authors spot the same pattern. “The RMB today,” write Eichengreen et al., “is not unlike the dollar in the 1950s and 1960s. Convertibility of RMB into dollars today is limited by capital account restrictions, while convertibility of dollars into gold was restricted by US monetary law under Bretton Woods. The 1950s and 1960s were the decades of the Bretton Woods System, when the dollar had to be backed by gold but was not convertible into the metal in the US. The offshore gold market in London then and the offshore RMB market today are products of a similar phenomenon, namely the imperfect convertibility of an international currency (the dollar then, the RMB now) into the ultimate reserve asset (gold then, the dollar now).”
Horn et al. also see “historical parallels to the era when the US started its rise as a global financial power, especially in the 1930s and after World War 2, when it used the US Ex-Im Bank, the US Exchange Stabilization Fund and the Fed to provide rescue funds to countries with large liabilities to US banks and exporters. Over time, these ad hoc activities by the US developed into a tested system of global crisis management, a path that China may possibly pursue as well.”
It had not fully struck me until I read these papers that the US dollar rose to global dominance before financial liberalization, which happened in the 1980s and 1990s. And part of its rise took the form of acting as an international lender of last resort.
Another reason the dollar slowly displaced sterling was that American financial technology raced ahead of British. Something similar is also happening today: China has pioneered online payment platforms on a far larger scale than anything we have in the West. As my Stanford colleague Darrell Duffie points out, China’s much-vaunted central bank digital currency (e-CNY) is not the thing to watch. It’s still Alipay, which handles three orders of magnitude more transactions than e-CNY and already has a large international presence, including 2.2 million users in the US.
Meanwhile, the US government is running significantly higher deficits than the ones I wrote about in 2004. And, unlike two decades ago, the Federal Reserve has been monetizing a large part of the deficits. Back then, the Fed balance sheet was 6% of GDP. Now, after successive rounds of quantitative easing and other interventions, it is up to 35%. The 2021-23 surge of US inflation cannot be explained without reference to major errors of fiscal and monetary policy. If the US intends to preserve its global monetary dominance, it is concealing that intention very well.
One striking consequence of these developments has been a significant surge in the dollar price of gold, which has risen more than 50% in the past five years, at a time when US Treasuries have fallen by 8%. John Maynard Keynes famously called the gold standard a “barbarous relic,” but there is nothing barbarous about a non-interest-bearing asset that outperforms an interest-bearing one. Data from the World Gold Council are revealing on this score. According to the most recent figures, the euro area holds 30% of total world official gold holdings, the US 23%, whereas Russia and China together hold just 12%.
However, the top buyers of gold between 2002 and 2023 were Russia (1,876 metric tons) and China (1,525 tons), with Turkey, India and Kazakhstan some way behind. The top sellers over the same period were the euro area (minus 1,726 tons) and Switzerland (minus 1,158 tons), with the English-speaking countries (minus 87 tons) far behind.
All That Glitters
Additions to gold reserves in metric tons
Source: World Gold Council
Yet this is not to suggest that gold is another, more ancient rival to the dollar. It is far from clear that accumulating gold will solve the Russian — and Chinese — problem of vulnerability to US sanctions. It is just a good illustration of how slowly the global monetary system changes.
The year before de Gaulle’s diatribe against the dollar was when my favorite James Bond film was released. Goldfinger remains a wonderful cinematic achievement, from the villain’s first victim — the actress Shirley Eaton, clad only in gold paint — to the exquisite exchange between Bond and Gert Frobe as a laser beam inches towards Sean Connery’s groin:
007: Do you expect me to talk?
Goldfinger: No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!
But, aside from the almost unmitigated sexism, one aspect of Goldfinger has dated absurdly. It’s the moment when the man from the Bank of England explains why Goldfinger’s suspicious accumulation of gold is a problem requiring 007’s attention:
We here at the Bank of England are the official depository for gold bullion. Just as Fort Knox, Kentucky, is for the United States. We know the amounts we each hold and the amounts deposited in other banks. We can estimate what is being held for industrial purposes. Thus, both governments can establish the true value of the dollar and the pound.
Those days were over within seven years, when President Richard Nixon broke the link between gold and the dollar that had been the anchor of the Bretton Woods System. Since then, the currencies of the world have fluctuated against one another and against gold, sometimes quite violently, sometimes barely noticeably.
Hardly a Currency Crisis
Source: Bank for International Settlements
Just look at the trade-weighted real effective exchange rate of the dollar since the “Nixon shock.” There’s a 32% plunge from July 1971 to October 1978. Then there’s a 49% rally to March 1985. Another 36% plunge to August 1992. Then up 33% to February 2002. Back down 26% to July 2011. And all the way up 53% to October 2022.
You can say what you like about the dollar, but it sure is bouncy. And it is precisely this lack of rigidity that explains the persistence of the post-1971 monetary system. Unlike the gold standard, the dollar system has an elastic anchor — a fiat dollar, the supply of which is primarily determined by domestic economic considerations.
Other currencies are very welcome to compete: the euro, the renminbi — and (who knows?) maybe the future “BRICS currency” imagined by Lula in Shanghai. But do not expect “de-dollarization” to follow the Hemingway two-stage model. The world changes its monetary anchor only one way. Gradually.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
- The World Will Welcome the Dollar’s Coming Slide: Marcus Ashworth
- What De-Dollarization? The Dollar Rules the World: Tyler Cowen
- The Dollar Will Vanquish Pretenders to Its Throne: Marcus Ashworth
For more Bloomberg Opinion, subscribe to our daily newsletter.
— With assistance by Elaine He
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Niall Ferguson at nferguson23@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net
