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Questo articolo è stato pubblicato il 23 dicembre 2010 alle ore 15:15.
BRUSSELS – If French President Nicolas Sarkozy had written the prologue to his presidency of the G-20, which has just commenced, he could not have done better. The run-up to the G-20’s summit in Seoul was marred by a series of currency controversies, bringing international monetary reform to the fore. Whereas French intentions to reform the international monetary system had initially been received skeptically, suddenly reform looks like the right priority at the right time.
The task is anything but simple. The subject is abstruse. No one outside academia has taken any interest in it for the last 20 years. Accordingly, there are hardly any comprehensive proposals on the table.
The United States, for which international monetary reform is synonymous with diminution of the dollar’s global role, is lukewarm. China, which launched the idea, is happy to see the discussion gaining momentum, but lacks precise ideas. As time is on its side, it sees no reason to hurry.
Emerging countries hold a similar opinion: they want their current problems to be solved but are not ready to re-write the rules of the game. Japan is keen, but its views on regional monetary cooperation do not match China’s. And Europe is distracted more than ever with its internal crises.
Nevertheless, international monetary reform remains a legitimate aspiration. As Vladimir Lenin once reputedly put it, the surest way to destroy the capitalist system [is] to debauch its currency. This applies to the world economy today.
When the rules of the global monetary game are unclear, inadequate, or obsolete, countries cannot abide by them, and some may attempt to exploit them to their own advantage. This undermines the fabric of international economic relations.
The agenda for reform boils down to four key problems. The first is exchange-rate relationships. Developed countries’ currencies have been floating against each other for several decades, but this has been only partly true of emerging and developing countries. Many, especially in Asia and the Persian Gulf, are de facto linked to the dollar, others to the euro.
But fixed exchange rates often lead to undervaluation (as in China) or overvaluation (as in Argentina at the beginning of the 2000’s, and, in a different context, several eurozone countries now). And floating and fixed exchange-rate regimes coexist uneasily, because volatility tends to affect the floating currencies (often the euro, and recently the Latin American currencies).
