Sovereign Debt Management and the Transformation from Keynesian to Neoliberal Monetary Governance in Britain

ABSTRACT

Private financial markets are central to the implementation of monetary governance. This necessary integration of public and private finance means the way states govern must evolve with developments in financial markets. This article examines how the rise of liability management underpinned a shift to market-based banking and transformed the operation of monetary policy in Britain. It assesses the period of reform between 1967 and 1981 and what this meant for monetary governance. Political economy literature depicts this period as a shift to depoliticised, deregulated governance with public authority giving way to market power. This paper challenges this perspective on the grounds that it misconstrues the problem policymakers faced. The shift from Keynesian to neoliberal monetary governance came in response to the change in banking practice with the rise of liability management and a parallel money market. This underpinned an explosion of credit creation that the old system of monetary policy, organised around the Base Rate and ‘primary’ discount market could not fix. As a result, the monetary authorities had to render this new financial environment governable. The period should therefore be reassessed in terms of the capacities the state attempted to construct to conduct monetary governance.     

1925年英国恢复金本位制缘由初探

从1816—1914年第一次世界大战爆发,英国在货币政策上一直坚持金本位制。但一战爆发之后,迫于军费开支剧增的压力,英国政府不得不予以放弃。战后,围绕着是否恢复以及如何恢复金本位这个问题,英国国内爆发了激烈的争论。最后,尽管有众多的反对意见,但民众对历史的怀念、传统的经济理论与战后英国复杂的国内局势驱使着英国最终于1925年宣布以战前平价的标准恢复了金本位制。     

Intervention, Corruption and Capture: The Nexus between Enterprises and the State

We study the nexus between enterprises and the state in transition countries, using new enterprise survey data. We examine the quality of governance, state intervention in enterprise decision-making, state benefits to firms, and corruption payments. The quality of governance varies both across countries and across different dimensions of governance within countries. Economic reform improves governance in countries with a low degree of 'state capture' by vested interests, but not in high-capture countries. Despite reform, state intervention in firm decisions continues, but it varies substantially across firms. At the micro level (within a country), there is clear substitution between the degree of state intervention, state benefits to firms, and corruption payments, which is consistent with a bargaining model of politicians and firms. But at the macro level (across countries) these elements are complementary, suggesting that politicians, perhaps under pressure from captor firms, have some control over the scope of regulation and intervention.     

China's Post-Listian Rise: Beyond Radical Globalisation Theory and the Political Economy of Neoliberal Hegemony

While China's rise has been much discussed, its meaning continues to be contested. This is true in radical international political economy, where, for example, it was the subject of (often polarised) debates between Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey prior to Arrighi's death in 2009. This reflected a broader debate in IPE between development theory and radical globalisation analysis. The key point of contention is whether China's rise represents a challenge to or further consolidation of neoliberal hegemony on a global scale. This article critically scrutinises some of the key assumptions of the radical globalisation approach, specifically, that China represents another form of the ‘competition state’ whose development aspirations have been radically constrained by global ‘new constitutionalism’ and American monetary power so as to conform to neoliberalism. Deploying a structurationist approach to global governance and an eclectic/regulatory analysis of the Chinese state, I argue that China has challenged neoliberalism by projecting its growing power through constitutionalised global governance. In the face of (declining) American power, global constitutionalism has provided an opportunity structure that may help China consolidate its long-term strategy of consensual development. Far from anchoring ‘neoliberal hegemony’, global economic governance is increasingly central to its unravelling.     

William Huskisson and the bullion controversy, 1810 *

The debate concerning the return to the gold standard in England during and in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, and the subsequent resumption of convertibility in 1819, played a significant role in British monetary orthodoxy. Its impact culminated in the 1925 decision to return to gold at prewar parity. Examining the contribution of William Huskisson - one of the authors of the Bullion Report - to the bullion controversy I argue that he played a major role in shaping British monetary policy of the nineteenth century.     

Gulf Cooperation Council Oil Exporters and the Future of the Dollar

How has industrial restructuring and technological upgrading in South Korea undertaken in the post-crisis era impacted on the state's capacity to guide strategic industry development? The latest reincarnation of the ‘end of the developmental state’ thesis proposes that industry policies are losing their strategic long-term oriented character due to the state's lack of legitimacy to play a guiding role after the economic recovery. I test this view in light of the Korean state's role, since the early 2000s, in the promotion of a new mobile communications software standard known as the Wireless Internet Platform for Interoperability (WIPI). I argue that the Korean state retains a strategic long-term approach to techno-industrial governance. The argument is developed through examining how bureaucratic actors gained the legitimacy to challenge Qualcomm, the strategy involved in promoting WIPI, and how the bureaucracy supported domestic firms under an increasingly open international trading environment. The findings reveal the state's ability to renew its legitimacy to play a developmental role through re-articulating policy goals from catching-up to nurturing innovation. Furthermore, the state has experimented with new forms of cooperation between government and business to nurture the growth of new infant technological growth sectors such as telecommunications.     

THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC ENTERPRISES: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE CANADIAN EXPERIENCE

ABSTRACT: Public enterprises have been an integral part of the involvement of the state in the economy for most of the 20th century. After 1980, privatization has been the dominant trend until the 2008–2010 economic crisis when new nationalizations happened. Ownership is only an element of a complex system of relations between a public enterprise and its institutional environment where the role of the board of directors, the mechanisms of coordination, the role of senior civil servants, etc. come to play. Using the Canadian experience with public enterprises, we suggest in this article that public enterprises could be interesting economic policy instruments in the future as in the past if such an economic policy exists. In other words, privatization did not solve the control issue over many large enterprises. Improved corporate governance should be considered. This article aims at improving the understanding of how by focusing on various aspects of the governance of public enterprises on their potential use and work. In Canada, public enterprises have been used to face the recent global crisis but they also come from a long tradition of intervention in the economy, a tradition closer to the European than the American. After reviewing recent developments in their governance, paths for future research are proposed.     

浮动本位兑换、双重汇率与中国经济:1870—1900

19世纪70年代以后,当世界上多数国家纷纷放弃金银复本位而采用金本位时,中国仍然是银铜复本位制度。与金银复本位两种本位货币之间有固定兑换比价不同,中国银铜复本位两种本位货币的兑换比价是浮动的,由此造成了对外是金银汇率,对内是银铜(钱)汇率的双重汇率。双重汇率导致了汇率贬值一倍时贸易却由顺差变为逆差,实际外债和赔款的增加加重了财政负担,制钱成本上升带来的物价上涨又加剧了中下层民众的贫困化。本文在郑友揆(1991)研究的基础上,结合货币理论的新进展和新的历史资料,分析1870年到1900年双重汇率对当时中国经济的影响,在此基础上以金银复本位为参照探讨中国银铜复本位制度的内在缺陷。     

网络经济下的金融理论与金融治理

建立在信息革命基础上的网络经济 ,对传统金融产业和金融理论产生了深刻的影响。网络金融成为了本世纪金融业发展的主流 ,电子货币也将在社会经济生活中发挥更大的作用。金融产业组织的变化和货币形态的变革 ,使货币理论和货币供求关系出现了新的变化 ,并导致了货币政策、金融市场等的一系列演进。金融体系主客体的变化 ,使金融风险有了新的特点 ,金融治理需要进行相应的调整。     

OPTIMAL MONETARY POLICY: WHAT WE KNOW AND WHAT WE DON'T KNOW*

In this article, I examine the current state of knowledge about optimal monetary policy. I distinguish between two literatures, basic and applied. The basic literature is explicit about the frictions that generate a positive value for money and make it socially beneficial. The applied literature is not. I describe the recent lessons about monetary policy that we have learned from each literature and discuss how the two distinct approaches may be usefully combined.     

Estimating the effects of forward guidance in rational expectations models

Simulations of forward guidance in rational expectations models should be assessed using the “modest policy interventions” framework introduced by Eric Leeper and Tao Zha. That is, the estimated effects of a policy intervention should be considered reliable only if that intervention is unlikely to trigger a revision in private sector beliefs about the way that monetary policy will be conducted. I show how to constrain simulations of forward guidance to ensure that they are regarded as modest policy interventions and illustrate the technique using a medium-scale DSGE model estimated on US data. I find that many experiments that generate the large responses of macroeconomic variables deemed implausible by many economists – the so-called “forward guidance puzzle” – are not modest policy interventions. Those experiments should therefore be treated with caution, since they may prompt agents to believe that there has been a change in the monetary policy regime that is not accounted for within the model. More reliable results can be obtained by constraining the experiment to be a modest policy intervention. In the cases I study, the quantitative effects on macroeconomic variables are more plausible when this constraint is imposed.     

Producing New Spaces of Violence: Libya and the Changing Style of NATO Interventions after the Global Financial Crisis

This paper argues that the way NATO conducts its interventions has altered since the Global Financial Crisis. The pressures of the Global Financial Crisis have forced NATO to shift from the sustained peacekeeping operation in Afghanistan to what I refer to as the trans-scalar space of intervention in Libya. Trans-scalar spaces of intervention are spaces where violence is temporarily concentrated by a transnational military apparatus to eliminate a perceived threat as efficiently as possible. The threats targeted are contained within a particular national locale and are unable to manifest themselves transnationally; their capacity is therefore several orders of magnitude below the force projection abilities of the transnational military force seeking its destruction. I examine how NATO’s creation of these new types of spaces has impacted global security and undermined territorial-based forms of governance. Despite the ensuing chaos which enveloped Libya after NATO departed, with their low cost and speed at which they can be organized this style of intervention will likely be replicated in the future.     

PROSPECTS OF AN INTERNATIONAL MONETARY SYSTEM CONSTITUTION

Cost-benefit reasons account for the adoption of the pre-World War I gold standard and the Bretton Woods system–the closest approximations to a constitution for the international monetary system that the world has experienced. Past rule-based international monetary proposals that were rejected were judged not to serve national interests. Current proposals do not deal with policymakers' and governments' self-interest in preserving their existing power to choose domestic objectives and to adopt policies to achieve those objectives.     

黄金价格、中国黄金储备与通货膨胀关系研究

文章通过格兰杰因果检验了黄金价格、人民币实际有效汇率、国内货币供应量与通货膨胀的关系。研究认为,黄金是对抗通货膨胀的有效工具,黄金价格上涨、黄金储备增大、国际石油价格和大宗商品价格上浮对通货膨胀有持续的拉动效应;货币供应量与通货膨胀之间存在短期与长期效应不一致的现象。提出密切关注黄金价格、增加国家黄金储备、建立黄金价格预警机制等措施。     

Deflationary policy under digital and fiat currency competition

I examine the implications of digital and fiat currency competition on optimal monetary policy according to the Friedman rule (a standard deflationary policy) in a Fernández-Villaverde and Sanches (2016) framework, with no search friction. Consistent with the existing literature, first, I find that monetary equilibrium under a purely private arrangement of digital currencies will not deliver a socially efficient allocation. Second, I place restrictions on the available supply of digital currencies and find that a socially efficient allocation is possible only if the upper bound on digital currency circulation is equal to the rate of time-preference, albeit some degree of government intervention is required to curb the profit-maximizing incentive of the miners. Third, I find that optimal monetary policy at the Friedman rule will be socially inefficient when digital currencies compete with government-issued fiat money. Finally, I show that the Friedman rule is a socially desirable policy only in a purely fiat monetary regime.     

Monetary policies to counter the zero interest rate: an overview of research

Many central banks have lowered their interest rates close to zero in response to the crisis since 2008. In standard monetary models the zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint implies the existence of a second steady state in addition to the inflation-targeting steady state. Large scale asset purchases (APP) have been used as a tool for easing of monetary policy in the ZLB regime. I provide a theoretical discussion of these issues using a stylized general equilibrium model in a global nonlinear setting. I also review briefly the empirical literature about effects of APP’s.     

The Current Wave of State Enterprise Reform in China: A Preliminary Appraisal

State enterprise reforms are underway in China, and include some positive and overdue corporate governance reform. However, the potential effectiveness of the reforms is compromised by the attempt of policy‐makers to achieve three goals which form an “impossible trinity”: increase firm autonomy; improve oversight; and assign new developmental missions to state firms. The goal of assigning new developmental missions to state firms is reflected in the design of new state investment companies which are intended to gradually take over ownership functions from existing agencies. The structure and function of the new ownership agencies undermines the potential of the corporate governance reforms at the enterprise level. These contradictions will be costly because state firms will likely be ineffective in carrying out developmental missions—particularly technology innovation—while also failing in the enterprise reform goal of becoming more efficient and profitable.     

Prices,interest rates,and the monetary standard: A study of the Gibson-Kitchin phenomenon

This paper analyzes the correlation between interest rates and prices that has persisted for the past 250 years: the Gibson-Kitchin phenomenon. We find that the Gibson-Kitchin phenomenon is not stationary throughout history. The stochastic process of prices and interest rates went through a significant structural change when the United States and Britain switched their monetary system from the gold standard to fiduciary standard. We do find convincing evidence for the presence of the Gibson-Kitchin phenomenon in the gold standard era. There was no significant trace of the Gibson-Kitchin phenomenon in the nongold standard era. We propose a “quantity theory of gold” hypothesis to explain these findings.     

The structural asymmetry of the international gold standard in Hawtrey’s works

Ralph G. Hawtrey was the British Treasury’s only economist during the interwar period. He developed a monetary theory of the cycle by which the inherent instability of credit under the gold standard caused fluctuations in output, incomes, and prices. Hawtrey was a monetary specialist who influenced the inner process of policymaking through his capacity as advisor to Blackett, Niemeyer, and Norman. An extensive analysis of his monetary theory in an open economy provides insight into why in the 1920s he advocated the general adoption of the gold exchange standard coupled with cooperation among central banks.     

COSTS AND BENEFITS OF EXCHANGE RATE STABILITY: CANADA'S INTERWAR EXPERIENCE

In January 1929, the Canadian government suspended gold exports and implemented a floating exchange rate regime that endured until the onset of World War II. In sharp contrast to the experience of other countries that left the gold standard, Canada's deflation and declining economic activity continued until 1933. This paper examines why the Canadian government chose to follow a restrictive monetary policy and how that policy affected the Canadian exchange rate. We show that the chosen policy was rational—given the government's assumptions and objectives—and that it was consistent with fiscal policy. In so doing, we argue that the government's commitment to monetary stability was credible. We show that one can explain the Canadian exchange rate's behavior by a simple expectations-based model of exchange rate determination, given external events and the government's monetary policy.