Recently I in a post came up with what I described as a crazy idea – that might in fact not be so crazy.
My suggestion was based on what I termed the Chuck Norris effect of monetary policy – that a central banks can ease monetary policy without printing money if it has a credible target. The Swiss central bank’s (SNB) actions to introduce a one-sided peg for the Swiss franc against the euro have demonstrated the power of the Chuck Norris effect.
The SNB has said it will maintain the peg until deflationary pressures in the Swiss economy disappears. The interesting thing is that the markets now on its own is doing the lifting so when the latest Swiss consumer prices data showed that we in fact now have deflation in Switzerland the franc weakened against the euro because market participants increased their bets that the SNB would devalue the franc further.
In recent days the euro crisis has escalated dramatically and it is pretty clear that what we are seeing in the European markets is having a deflationary impact not only on the European economy, but also on the global economy. Hence, monetary easing from the major central banks of the world seems warranted so why do the ECB not just do what the SNB has done? For that matter why does the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan not follow suit? The “crazy” idea would be a devaluation of euro, dollar, pound and yen not against each other but against commodity prices. If the four major central banks (I am leaving out the People’s Bank of China here) tomorrow announced that their four currencies had been devalued 15% against the CRB commodity index then I am pretty sure that global stock markets would increase sharply and the positive effects in global macro data would likely very fast be visible.
The four central banks should further announce that they would maintain the one-sided new “peg” for their currencies against CRB until the nominal GDP level of all for countries/regions have returned to pre-crisis trend levels around 10-15% above the present levels and that they would devalue further if NGDP again showed signs of contracting. They would also announce that the policies of pegging against CRB would be suspended once NGDP had returned to the pre-crisis trend levels.
If they did that do you think we would still talk about a euro crisis in two months’ time?
PS this idea is a variation of Irving Fisher’s compensated dollar plan and it is similar to the scheme that got Sweden fast and well out of the Great Depression. See Don Patinkin excellent paper on “Irving Fisher and His Compensated Dollar Plan” and Claes Berg’s and Lars Jonung’s paper on Swedish monetary policy in 1930s.
PPS this it not really my idea, but rather a variation of an idea one of my colleagues came up with – he is not an economist so that is maybe why he is able to think out of the box.
PPPS I real life I am not really a big supporter of coordinated monetary action and I think it has mostly backfired when central banks have tried to manipulate exchange rates. However, the purpose of this idea is really not to manipulate FX rates per se, but rather to ease global monetary conditions and the devaluation against CRB is really only method to increase money velocity.
