Interest rates and currency manipulation impact economies around the world.

Barry Eichengreen writes: For much of the year, investors have been fixated on when the Fed will achieve “liftoff” – that is, when it will raise interest rates by 25 basis points, or 0.25%, as a first step toward normalizing monetary conditions. Markets have soared and plummeted in response to small changes in Fed statements perceived as affecting the likelihood that liftoff is imminent.

But, in seeking to gauge changes in US monetary conditions, investors have been looking in the wrong place. Since mid-August, when Chinese policymakers startled the markets by devaluing the renminbi by 2%, China’s official intervention in foreign-exchange markets has continued, in order to prevent the currency from falling further. The Chinese authorities have been selling foreign securities, mainly United States Treasury bonds, and buying up renminbi.

Emerging-market countries receiving capital inflows did the same. These countries’ foreign reserves, mainly held in US securities, topped $8 trillion at their peak last year.

The effects of these purchases attracted considerable attention. In 2005, US Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan pointed to the phenomenon as an explanation for his famous “conundrum”: interest rates on Treasury bonds were lower than market conditions appeared to warrant.

Now this process has gone into reverse. Although no one outside official Chinese circles knows the exact magnitude of China’s foreign-exchange intervention, informed guesses suggest that it has been running at roughly $100 billion a month since mid-August. Observers believe that roughly 60% of China’s liquid reserves are in US Treasury bills.

Recall that the Fed began its third round of quantitative easing (QE3) by purchasing $40 billion of securities a month, before boosting the volume to $85 billion. Monthly sales of $60 billion by China’s government would lie squarely in the middle. Estimates of the effects of QE3 differ. But the weight of the evidence is that QE3 had a modest but significant downward impact on Treasury yields and a positive effect on demand for riskier assets.

Foreign sales at a rate of $60 billion per month raise yields by ten basis points. Given that China has been at it for 2.5 months, this implies that the equivalent of a 25-basis-point increase in interest rates has already been injected into the market.

Some would object that the renminbi is weak because China is experiencing capital outflows by private investors, and that some of this private money also flows into US financial markets. This is technically correct, but it is already factored into the changes in interest rates described above. Recall that capital also flowed out of the US when the Fed was engaged in QE, without vitiating the effects.

Another objection is that QE operates not just through the so-called portfolio channel – by changing the mix of securities in the market – but also through the expectations channel. It signals that the authorities are seriously committed to making the future different from the past. But if Chinese intervention is just a one-off event, and there are no expectations of it continuing. The impact should be smaller than QE.

The problem is that no one knows how long capital outflows from China will persist or how long the Chinese authorities will continue to intervene. From this standpoint, the Fed’s decision to wait to begin liftoff is eminently sensible. And, given that China holds (and is therefore now selling) euros as well, the European Central Bank also should bear this in mind when it decides in December whether to ramp up its own program of quantitative easing.

The the rocky road to globalization how individual coutries handle sovereign debt is still problematic.  The UN has come up with the a solution, but the US, Canada, Germany, Israel, Japan, and the United Kingdom are not in agreement.

Joseph E. Stiglitz and Martin Guzman write:  Every advanced country has a bankruptcy law, but there is no equivalent framework for sovereign borrowers. That legal vacuum matters, because, as we now see in Greece and Puerto Rico, it can suck the life out of economies.

In September, the United Nations took a big step toward filling the void, approving a set of principles for sovereign-debt restructuring. The nine precepts – namely, a sovereign’s right to initiate a debt restructuring, sovereign immunity, equitable treatment of creditors, (super) majority restructuring, transparency, impartiality, legitimacy, sustainability, and good faith in negotiations – form the rudiments of an effective international rule of law.

The overwhelming support for these principles, with 136 UN members voting in favor and only six against (led by the United States), shows the extent of global consensus on the need to resolve debt crises in a timely manner. But the next step – an international treaty establishing a global bankruptcy regime to which all countries are bound – may prove more difficult.

Recent events underscore the enormous risks posed by the lack of a framework for sovereign debt restructuring. Puerto Rico’s debt crisis cannot be resolved. Notably, US courts invalidated the domestic bankruptcy law, ruling that because the island is, in effect, a US colony, its government had no authority to enact its own legislation.

In the case of Argentina, another US court allowed a small minority of so-called vulture funds to jeopardize a restructuring process to which 92.4% of the country’s creditors had agreed. Similarly, in Greece, the absence of an international legal framework was an important reason why its creditors – the troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund – could impose policies that inflicted enormous harm.

But some powerful actors would stop well short of establishing an international legal framework. The International Capital Market Association (ICMA), supported by the IMF and the US Treasury, suggests changing the language of debt contracts. The cornerstone of such proposals is the implementation of better collective action clauses (CACs), which would make restructuring proposals approved by a supermajority of creditors binding on all others.

But while better CACs certainly would complicate life for vulture funds, they are not a comprehensive solution. In fact, the focus on fine-tuning debt contracts leaves many critical issues unresolved, and in some ways bakes in the current system’s deficiencies – or even makes matters worse.

For example, one serious question that remains unaddressed by the ICMA proposal is how to settle conflicts that arise when bonds are issued in different jurisdictions with different legal frameworks. Contract law might work well when there is only one class of bondholders; but when it comes to bonds issued in different jurisdictions and currencies, the ICMA proposal fails to solve the difficult “aggregation” problem (how does one weight the votes of different claimants?).

All six countries that voted against the UN resolution (the US, Canada, Germany, Israel, Japan, and the United Kingdom) all refuse to accept that the rationale for a domestic rule of law.

Respect for the nine principles approved by the UN is precisely what’s been missing in recent decades. The 2012 Greek debt restructuring, for example, did not restore sustainability, as the desperate need for a new restructuring only three years later demonstrated. And it has become almost the norm to violate the principles of sovereign immunity and equitable treatment of creditors, evidenced so clearly in the New York court’s decision on Argentine debt.

The irony is that countries like the US object to an international legal framework because it interferes with their national sovereignty. Yet the most important principle to which the international community has given its assent is respect for sovereign immunity: There are limits beyond which markets – and governments – cannot go.

Incumbent governments may be tempted to exchange sovereign immunity for better financing conditions in the short run, at the expense of larger costs that will be paid by their successors. No government should have the right to give up sovereign immunity, just as no person can sell himself into slavery.

Debt restructuring is not a zero-sum game. The frameworks that govern it determine not just how the pie is divided among formal creditors and between formal and informal claimants, but also the size of the pie.

A system that actually resolves sovereign-debt crises must be based on principles that maximize the size of the pie and ensure that it is distributed fairly. We now have the international community’s commitment to the principles; we just have to build the system.

A reason why the central banks should not have as big as role as they now do.  Their focus on inflation may well be mistaken.

Stephen S. Roach writes:  Targeting in a world without inflation, central banks have lost their way. With benchmark interest rates stuck at the dreaded zero bound, monetary policy has been transformed from an agent of price stability into an engine of financial instability. A new approach is desperately needed.

The US Federal Reserve exemplifies this policy dilemma. After the Federal Open Market Committee decided in September to defer yet again the start of its long-awaited normalization of monetary policy, its inflation doves are openly campaigning for another delay.

For the inflation-targeting purists, the argument seems impeccable. The headline consumer-price index (CPI) is near zero, and “core” or underlying inflation – the Fed’s favorite indicator – remains significantly below the seemingly sacrosanct 2% target. With a long-anemic recovery looking shaky again, the doves contend that there is no reason to rush ahead with interest-rate hikes.

Of course, there is more to it than that. Because monetary policy operates with lags, central banks must avoid fixating on the here and now, and instead use imperfect forecasts to anticipate the future effects of their decisions. In the Fed’s case, the presumption that the US will soon approach full employment has caused the so-called dual mandate to collapse into one target: getting inflation back to 2%.

Here, the Fed is making a fatal mistake, as it relies heavily on a timeworn inflation-forecasting methodology that filters out the “special factors” driving the often volatile prices of goods like food and energy. The logic is that the price fluctuations will eventually subside, and headline price indicators will converge on the core rate of inflation.

This approach failed spectacularly when it was adopted in the 1970s, causing the Fed to underestimate virulent inflation. And it is failing today, leading the Fed consistently to overestimate underlying inflation. Indeed, with oil prices having plunged by 50% over the past year, the Fed stubbornly maintains that faster price growth – and the precious inflation rate of 2% – is just around the corner.

Missing from this logic is an appreciation of the new and powerful global forces that are bearing down on inflation. According to the International Monetary Fund’s latest outlook, the price deflator for all advanced economies should increase by just 1.5% annually, on average, from now to 2020 – not much higher than the crisis-depressed 1.1% pace of the last six years. Moreover, most wholesale prices around the world remain in outright deflation.

But, rather than recognize the likely drivers of these developments – namely, a seemingly chronic shortfall of global aggregate demand amid a supply glut and a deflationary profusion of technological innovations and new supply chains – the Fed continues to minimize the deflationary impact of global forces. It would rather attribute low inflation to successful inflation targeting, and the Great Moderation that it presumably spawned.

This prideful interpretation amounted to the siren song of an extremely accommodative monetary policy. Unable to disentangle the global and domestic pressures suppressing inflation, a price-targeting Fed has erred consistently on the side of easy money.

This is apparent in the fact that, over the last 15 years, the real federal funds rate – the Fed’s benchmark policy rate, adjusted for inflation – has been in negative territory more than 60% of the time, averaging -0.6% since May 2001. From 1990 to 2000, by contrast, the real federal funds rate averaged 2.2%. In short, over the last decade and a half, the Fed has gone well beyond a powerful disinflation in setting its policy interest rate.

The consequences have been problematic, to say the least. Over the same 15-year period, financial markets have become unhinged, with a profusion of asset and credit bubbles leading to a series of crises that almost pushed the world economy into the abyss in 2008-2009. But rather than recognize, let alone respond to, pre-crisis excesses, the Fed has remained agnostic about them, pointing out that bubble-spotting is, at best, an imperfect science.

That is hardly a convincing reason for central banks to remain fixated on inflation targeting. Not only have they failed repeatedly to get the inflation forecast right; they now risk fueling renewed financial instability and sparking another crisis. Just as a few of us warned of impending crisis in the 2003-2006 period, some – including the Bank of International Settlements and the IMF– are sounding the alarm today, but to no avail.

To be sure, inflation targeting was once essential to limit runaway price growth. In today’s inflationless world, however, it is counterproductive. Yet the inflation targeters who dominate today’s major central banks insist on fighting yesterday’s war.

In this sense, modern central bankers resemble the British army in the Battle of Singapore in 1942. Convinced that the Japanese would attack from the sea, the British defenses were encased in impenetrable concrete bunkers, with fixed artillery that could fire only to the south. So when the Japanese emerged from the jungle and mangrove swamps of the Malay Peninsula in the north, the British were powerless to stop them. Singapore quickly fell, in what is widely considered Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s most ignominious military defeat.

Central bankers, like the British army in Singapore, are aiming their weapons in the wrong direction. It is time for them to turn their policy arsenal toward today’s enemy: financial instability. On that basis alone, the case for monetary-policy normalization has never been more compelling.