Pat Horan directed me to this FT piece on India’s recent demonetization of “large denomination bills” (worth about $8 and $16 each.)

When Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, announced in November that Rs1,000 ($16) and Rs500 notes would no longer be legal tender, he suggested that corrupt officials, businessmen and criminals — popularly believed to hoard large amounts of illicit cash — would be stuck with “worthless pieces of paper”.

At the time, government officials had suggested that as much as one-third of India’s outstanding currency would be purged from the economy — as the wealthy abandoned or destroyed it, rather than admit to their hoardings — reducing central bank liabilities and creating a government windfall.

But the Reserve Bank of India’s annual report on Wednesday suggested that most holders of the old currency managed to dispose of it, estimating that banned notes worth Rs15.28tn ($239bn) were returned to the bank. That amounts to 99 per cent of the Rs15.44tn of the old high-value notes that were in circulation when Mr Modi made his announcement, according to the finance ministry.

The bank’s estimate follows media reports that complex money-laundering networks sprang up in the wake of the demonetisation to help wealthy Indians deposit huge volumes of previously undeclared currency without exposing themselves to tax authorities. Such people allegedly sold the old notes, at a discount, to brokers who then dispatched low-income Indians to deposit or exchange them at banks.

Some of my market monetarist colleagues suggest that tight money policies create a “shortage” of the medium of exchange, and that this can cause a recession.  I argue that the real problem with tight money is that it raises the value of money, by reducing equilibrium NGDP.  Each dollar nows buys a larger share of NGDP. Because nominal wages are sticky, falling NGDP leads to more unemployment.  In my view, tight money does not create a true “shortage”, as anyone who wants more cash can always go to the ATM and get some.  On the other hand, people who want a rent controlled apartment in NYC often cannot get one— as rent control creates a true shortage.  Ditto for people who need a kidney transplant.  Those shortages are caused by price controls.

The Indian policy of denationalization of large bills really did create a money shortage.  On that point I don’t think there is any dispute.  And since the vast majority of transactions in India (98% by volume, 63% by value) involve cash, then this really was a policy than might be expected to sharply reduce transactions, and hence NGDP.   Instead, the slowdown was quite mild, and in my view ought to be regarded as more of a real (supply-side) shock.

It appears the cash experiment did lead to a slowdown in GDP, but much milder than what one might have expected from such a dramatic monetary contraction. For people like me, who focus on the role of money as a medium of account, this is no big surprise.  The silver coin shortage of 1964 also failed to significantly slow the US economy.  That’s because these shortages were widely viewed as temporary, and what matters is not the current stance of monetary policy, but rather the expected path of policy over the next few years.  As long as one-year forward NGDP expectations are not greatly affected, the current condition of the economy should hold up pretty well, even if there is a severe shortage of transactions media. The damage to India that did occur ought to be regarded as more of a real (supply-side) shock, sort of like a breakdown of cash registers.

On the other hand, economists who focus on the role of money as a medium of exchange also tend to think that it’s the future path of policy that is crucial, so I’m not sure whether the Indian experiment actually tested any specific model, although I’d be interested in what other people think.

PS.  Here’s a post I did last year, at the beginning of the Indian experiment.

PPS.  This experiment did confirm a point I often make—that data on cash in circulation are highly accurate.  The ratio of global cash to global GDP (and also American cash to American GDP) is very high, which suggests that cash is primarily used as a store of value.

PPPS.  India’s GDP grew at 5.7% over the past 12 months.  That’s modestly lower than in recent years, but experts also attributed the weak second quarter to de-stocking by manufacturers in anticipation of the new GST, which took effect July 1st.

Here is the Treasury’s list of the three criteria it uses to identify “currency manipulators”:

Pursuant to Section 701 of the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015, this section seeks to identify any major trading partner of the United States that has: (1) a significant bilateral trade surplus with the United States, (2) a material current account surplus, and (3) engaged in persistent one-sided intervention in the foreign exchange market. Section 701 requires data on each major trading partner’s bilateral trade balance with the United States, its current account balance as a percentage of GDP, the three-year change in the current account balance as a percentage of GDP, foreign exchange reserves as a percentage of short-term debt, and foreign exchange reserves as a percentage of GDP. Data for the most recent four-quarter period (January to December 2016, unless otherwise noted) are provided in Table 1 (on p. 13) and Table 2 (below).

This is obviously beyond stupid.  (Since when do bilateral trade deficits mean anything?)  But at least the Treasury doesn’t try to read minds, and interpret the intentions of other countries.

Matthew McOsker sent me an article from the Economist, which nicely illustrates the confusion surrounding the concept of currency manipulation:

Awkwardly for America, two of its friends in Asia have recently scored more highly than China: South Korea and, most clearly, Taiwan. But the highest score of all goes to Switzerland, by dint of its whopping current-account surplus and its hefty foreign-currency purchases. This illustrates one of the method’s flaws: in terms of the goods and services that it can actually buy, the Swiss franc is in fact among the world’s most overvalued currencies.

This is why it’s so important to have a clear definition of currency manipulation.  The Economist clearly thinks the concept is related to undervalued currencies, and most people probably agree.  But whether a currency is “undervalued” is completely unrelated to whether some of the other criteria are met, such as large purchases of foreign exchange and/or a current account surplus.  If you really believe that large purchases of foreign exchange and a big current account surplus constitute currency manipulation, then you should have the courage of your convictions and label Switzerland as one of the world’s worst villains.  After all, it is among the world’s leaders in both categories.

And this leads to another irony.  I frequently point out that the more conservative the central bank, the bigger the balance sheet as a share of GDP. Thus in the future we may end up seeing more and more countries like Switzerland, with huge purchases of foreign assets in a futile attempt to prevent their currency from appreciating.

To avoid being labeled a currency manipulator, they may instead choose to buy domestic assets (as in Japan).  This will also boost domestic saving, depreciate the currency and increase the current account.  But since they won’t be buying “foreign exchange”, they just might fool the US Treasury.  (It’s not hard, when the Treasury is hamstrung by the silly mandate given to it by Congress.)

Here’s another irony.  Some people seem to think that fixed exchange rate regimes are evidence of currency manipulation.  But in the 1990s the EU had a fixed exchange rate system with the express purpose of preventing currency manipulation.  In fact, fixed exchange rate regimes determine the path of the nominal exchange rate.  But if currency manipulation happens at all (I doubt it), then it surely relates to real exchange rates. Thus if currency manipulation happens, it is equally likely to occur with a fixed or floating exchange rate regime.  Indeed you don’t even need your own currency to “manipulate” your real exchange rate.  Germany depreciated its real exchange rate in the 2000s.  If Wisconsin wanted to depreciate its real exchange rate it could do so.

But why would they want to?

Commenter Matthew McOsker made this attempt:

I think the definition is simple where one country consciously manages the value of their domestic country against a foreign country.

What does it mean to “manage” the value of a currency. If you mean “enact government policies that impact the exchange rate”, then all countries are guilty.  If you mean enact government policies with the intention of affecting the exchange rate, then does it matter if that’s the sole purpose, or just one of many channels?  Didn’t Bernanke mention exchange rates as one channel by which QE could affect the US economy?  Some people argue that Japan’s recent adoption of negative IOR was (among other things) aimed at depreciating the yen.  But they had no specific exchange rate peg, and the yen continues to move up and down each day.  It probably wasn’t aimed at boosting the current account balance, but rather boosting prices and GDP. Is that currency manipulation?

People are going to need to be much more specific if they intend to convince me that there is a coherent definition out there.

Due to my recent move, I’m still catching up on the last few months in the blogosphere.  (Today I spent $750 (and many hours) registering my car in California.)  Thus I finally got around to reading an earlier post by David Glasner, which responds to my complaint that “currency manipulation” is an incoherent concept.  More specifically, I made this charge:

But I would go much further; there is no intellectually respectable definition of currency manipulation.

And David responded:

Well, my only response is that I consider Max Corden to be just about the most theoretically-respectable economist alive. So let me quote at length from Corden’s essay “Macroeconomic and Industrial Policies” reprinted in his volume Protection, Growth and Trade (pp. 288-301)

There is clearly a relationship between macroeconomic policy and industrial policy on the foreign trade side. . . . The nominal exchange rate is an instrument of macroeconomic policy, while tariffs, import quotas, export subsidies and taxes and voluntary export restraints can all be regarded as instruments of industrial policy. Yet an exchange-rate change can have “industrial” effects. It therefore seems useful to clarify the relationship between exchange-rate policy and the various micro or industrial-policy instruments.

The first step is to distinguish a nominal from a real exchange-rate change and to introduce the concept of “exchange-rate protection. . . . If the exchange rate depreciates to the same extent as all costs and prices are rising (relative to costs and prices in other countries) there may be no real change at all. The nominal exchange rate is a monetary phenomenon, and it is possible that it is no more than that. A monetary authority may engineer a nominal devaluation designed to raise the domestic currency prices of exports and import-competing goods, and hence to benefit these industries. But if nominal wages quickly rise to compensate for the higher tradable-goods prices, no real effects – no rises in the absolute and relative profitability of tradable-goods industries – will remain. Monetary policy can influence the nominal-exchange rate, and possibly can even maintain it at a fixed value, but it cannot necessarily affect the real exchange rate. The real exchange rate refers to the relative price of tradable and non-tradable goods. While its absolute value is difficult to measure because of the ambiguity of the distinction between tradable and non-tradable goods, changes in it are usually – and reasonably – measured or indicated by relating changes in the nominal exchange rate to changes in some index of domestic prices or costs, or possibly to the average nominal wage level. This is sometimes called an index of competitiveness.

A nominal devaluation will devalue the real exchange rate if there is some rigidity or sluggishness either in the prices of non-tradables or in nominal wages. The nominal devaluation will then raise the prices of tradables relative to wage costs and to labour-intensive non-tradables. Thus it protects tradables. This is “exchange-rate protection”. It protects the whole group of tradables relative to non-tradables. It will tend to shift resources into tradables out of non-tradables and domestic demand in the opposite direction. If at the same time macroeconomic policy ensures a demand-supply balance for non-tradables – hence decreasing aggregate demand (absorption) in real terms appropriately – a balance of payments surplus (or at least a lesser deficit than before) will result. This refers to the balance of payments on current account since the concurrent fiscal and monetary policies can have varying effects on private capital inflow.

If the motive for the real devaluation was to protect tradables, then the current account surplus will be only a by-product, leading to more accumulation of foreign exchange reserves than the country’s monetary authority really wanted. Alternatively, if the motive for the real devaluation was to build up the foreign-exchange reserves – or to stop their decline – then the protection of tradables will be the by-product.

The main point to make is that a real exchange-rate change has effects on the relative and absolute profitability of different industries, a real devaluation favouring tradables relative to non-tradables, and a real appreciation the opposite. A nominal exchange-rate change can thus serve an industrial-policy purpose, provided it can be turned into a real exchange-rate change and that the incidental effects on the balance of payments are accepted.

This does not mean that it is an optimal form of industrial policy. . . . [P]rotection policy could be directed more precisely to the industries to be protected, avoiding the by-product effect of an undesired balance-of-payments surplus; and in any case it can be argued that defensive protection policy is unlikely to be optimal, positive adjustment policy being preferable. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to find examples of countries that have practiced exchange-rate protection, if implicitly. They have intervened in the foreign-exchange market to prevent an appreciation of the exchange rate that might otherwise have taken place – or at least, they have “leaned against the wind.” – not because they really wanted to build up foreign-exchange reserves, but because they wanted to protect their tradable-goods industries – usually mainly their export industries.

Notice that the first part of this quotation repeatedly makes the point that what matters is not the nominal exchange rate, but rather the real exchange rate.  The nominal rate matters only to the extent that it impacts the real rate.  That’s progress, as David had previously cited data on China’s nominal exchange rate (specifically the peg to the dollar) as evidence of currency manipulation. I pointed out that the real value of the Chinese yuan had been appreciating during this period.   In his reply David notes (correctly) that the real appreciation does not prove that China was not manipulating the currency.  I’m happy to accept that response, and leave China as an open question.  Perhaps China did manipulate its currency, but we’d need to go beyond the nominal exchange rate peg.

But I’m still trying to discover a definition of currency manipulation in the Corden quote above.  Is it here?

A nominal devaluation will devalue the real exchange rate if there is some rigidity or sluggishness either in the prices of non-tradables or in nominal wages. The nominal devaluation will then raise the prices of tradables relative to wage costs and to labour-intensive non-tradables. Thus it protects tradables.

I can’t figure out what that means.  Taken literally it seems to imply that a nominal appreciation depreciation that is associated with a real appreciation depreciation is a form of protectionism.  But that’s obviously nonsense.  So what is he claiming?  We know the nominal exchange rate doesn’t matter; only the real rate matters.  But currency manipulation can’t be just a depreciation in the real exchange rate, as real exchange rates move around for all sorts of reasons. If a revolution broke out in Indonesia tomorrow, I don’t doubt that the real value the their currency would plummet.  But no one would accuse Indonesia of currency manipulation.

So we need to look deeper than the nominal exchange rate, and we need to look deeper than the real exchange rate.  How about a decline in the real exchange rate caused by government policy?  Maybe, but I don’t recall anyone accusing the Norwegians of currency manipulation when they set up a sovereign wealth fund for their oil riches.  That’s a government policy that encourages national saving and hence boosts the current account.  Nor was Australia accused of currency manipulation when they did tax reform in the late 1990s.

The term ‘motive’ seems to play a role in the passage above:

If the motive for the real devaluation was to protect tradables, then the current account surplus will be only a by-product, leading to more accumulation of foreign exchange reserves than the country’s monetary authority really wanted. Alternatively, if the motive for the real devaluation was to build up the foreign-exchange reserves – or to stop their decline – then the protection of tradables will be the by-product.

As an economist, references to “motives” make me very uncomfortable.  Let’s take the example of China.  Did China’s government try to reduce the real value of the yuan because they saw what happened during the 1997 SE Asia crisis, and wanted a big war chest in case they faced a balance of payments crisis?  Or did they do the weak yuan policy to shift resources from domestic industries to tradable goods industries?  I have absolutely no idea, nor do I see why it matters.  Surely if a concept of currency manipulation has any coherent meaning, it cannot depend on the motive of the policymakers in a particular country?  We aren’t mind readers.  This is especially true if we are to believe that currency manipulation hurts other countries, as its proponent seem to suggest.  How will it be identified?

In the spirit of Bastiat, consider the following analogy.  Suppose that for years we had been buying bananas from Colombia for 10 cents a pound.  American consumers got to eat lots of cheap tasty fruit, which don’t grow well in non-tropical countries.  Then in 2018, Trump sends a team of investigators down to Colombia, and finds out that we’ve been scammed.  It’s actually not a warm country, indeed quite cool due to its high elevation.  The Colombian government had spent millions building giant greenhouses to grow bananas.  We’ve been tricked into buying all these cheap bananas from Colombia, which artificially created a “competitive advantage” in the banana industry through subsidies.

Here’s my question:  Why does it matter why the Colombian bananas were cheap?  If we benefited from buying the bananas at 10 cents a pound, why would we care if the price reflected true competitive advantage or government subsidy?  Does the US benefit from buying 10-cent bananas, or not?

But that’s not all.  Even if you convinced me that we should worry about interventionist policies in our trading partners, I’d still want a definition of currency manipulation.  There are a billion ways that a foreign government could influence a real exchange rate.  Which ones are “manipulation”? It’s meaningless to talk about China depreciating its currency, without explaining HOW.  A currency is just a price, and reasoning from a currency change (real or nominal) is simply reasoning from a price change.  Which specific actions constitute currency manipulation?  I don’t want motives, I need verifiable actions.  And does this concept have to involve a current account surplus?  Australia’s been running CA deficits for as long as I can remember.  Suppose the Aussie government did enough “currency manipulation” to reduce their trend CA deficit from 4% of GDP to 2% of GDP.  But it was still a deficit.  Would that be “manipulation”.  Why or why not?

Should we care why a country has a big CA surplus? Suppose Switzerland has a big CA surplus due to high private saving rates, Singapore has a big CA surplus due to high public saving in common stocks, and China has a CA surplus due to high public saving in foreign exchange.  What difference does it make?  (And I haven’t even addressed Ricardian equivalence, which further clouds these distinctions.)

We know that the only way that governments can affect the real exchange rate is by enacting policies that impact national saving or national investment.  But almost all policies impact either national saving or national investment.  So which of those count as manipulation?  Is it merely policies that lead to the accumulation of foreign exchange?  If so, then won’t you simply encourage countries to use some other technique for boosting national saving? An alternative policy that avoids having them be labeled currency manipulators?

And why is this called “creating a competitive advantage”.  It doesn’t give an overall economy a competitive advantage, just one sector—exports. Other sectors are put in an equal and opposite disadvantage.  So why not call these currency manipulation policies “competitive disadvantage”.  Or conversely, why not label agricultural subsidies a form of “competitive advantage”.  After all, just as high saving policies boost the export sector, agricultural subsidies boost the agricultural sector.  Or consider America’s low saving fiscal policy, which boosts our service sector.  Do those policies also give America a competitive advantage?  After all, services are far bigger than exports.

When you read people use the term “competitive advantage” it’s hard to avoid the inference that they are claiming that these policies will somehow boost aggregate demand.  Paul Krugman rightly mocked those arguments back in the 1990s, pointing out that monetary policy determines AD.  So then is “currency manipulation” just a special theory that only applies at the zero bound?  It’s hard to tell, the descriptions of this concept are all so vague.

I’d still like a very short and highly precise definition of currency manipulation.  Just a couple sentences.  What data points do I look at to determine if a currency is being manipulated?  If it’s the nominal exchange rate then I disagree with the definition.  If it’s the real exchange rate then I disagree with the definition.  If it’s the current account balance then I disagree with the definition.  If it’s the accumulation of foreign exchange then I disagree with the definition.  A definition involving any of those criteria would be so flawed as to be meaningless.  So what is the definition?

PS.  David also asks the following question:

Scott often cites sticky prices as an important assumption of macroeconomics, so I don’t understand why he thinks that the nominal exchange rate has no effect on trade. If prices do not all instantaneously adjust to a change in the nominal exchange rate, changes in nominal exchange rates are also changes in real exchange rates until prices adjust fully to the new exchange rate.

Talking about the effect of a price on quantities is reasoning from a price change, and hence wrong.  If the currency depreciation is caused by monetary stimulus, then I agree that output is likely to rise in the short run, due to sticky wages.  But that’s equally true in a closed economy.  As far as the trade balance, it depends on the relative size of the income and substitution effects.  The massive dollar devaluation of 1933 had almost no effect on the trade balance, as the income and substitution effects were roughly equal size, but pushed in opposite directions.  So was that currency manipulation?  Did FDR’s motives matter?  I still don’t understand why any of this matters.

PPS.  David’s post also refers to “undervalued currencies”, but this term is just as vague as currency manipulation or competitive advantage.  What makes a currency undervalued?

Here’s The Economist:

WHEN America’s unemployment was last as low as it has been recently, in early 2007, wages were growing by about 3.5% a year. Today wage growth seems stuck at about 2.5%. This puzzles economists. Some say the labour market is less healthy than the jobless rate suggests; others point to weak productivity growth or low inflation expectations. The latest idea is to blame retiring baby-boomers.

There’s really no mystery here to explain.  Slow wage growth is caused by slow NGDP growth.  Period.  End of story.

Now perhaps there’s an NGDP mystery—how can unemployment be so low with NGDP growing at a rate of barely over 3%/year over the past two years?  But on closer inspection, even that is not a mystery.  Here’s Miles Kimball:

More and more central banks are facing a situation in which the output gap they are looking at looks close to zero, but inflation is below their target. This is arguably the case for Japan, Sweden and the US, for example. Even the eurozone is getting close to this situation. Sometimes journalists discuss a zero output gap combined with too-low inflation as if such a situation were strange, but a range of different macroeconomic theories all have the property that a zero output gap is consistent with any constant inflation rate. (This is an aspect of “monetary superneutrality.”)

The media seems to really struggle with the concept of monetary superneutrality. Since the 1970s, economists have understood that there is no long run trade-off between inflation and unemployment, but people persist is believing that if we could just raise inflation from 1.5% to 2% then lots more people would enter the labor force.  That’s unlikely.

PS.  In a recent post I pointed out that the public’s views on political correctness are not what you might assume.  Now we have a new poll showing that a plurality of African-Americans favor keeping Confederate statues in place.  Even if the poll is slightly off (the sample size is small) anything less than 10 to 1 black opposition to keeping Confederate statues is a surprise to me.  And Hispanics are almost 3 to 1 in favor of keeping the statues, the same as whites.  So much for the rainbow coalition.

We should not assume that liberal leaders speak for rank and file liberals, or that black leaders speak for the black community as a whole.