Currency Wars_ The Making of the Next Global Crisis - James Rickards [74]
In the run-up to the G20 leaders’ summit in Seoul in November 2010, Geithner tried to paint China into a corner by articulating a percentage test for when trade surpluses became excessive and unsustainable from a global perspective. In general, any annual trade surplus in excess of 4 percent of GDP would be treated as a sign that the currency of the surplus country needed to be revalued in order to tilt the terms of trade away from the surplus country and toward deficit countries like the United States. This was something that used to happen automatically under the classical gold standard but now required central bank currency manipulation.
Geithner’s idea went nowhere. He had wanted to target China, yet, unfortunately for his thesis, Germany also became a target, because the German trade surplus was about as large as China’s when expressed as a percentage of GDP. By Geithner’s own metrics, the Germany currency, the euro, would also have to be revalued upward. This was the last thing Germany and the rest of Europe wanted, given the precarious nature of their economic recoveries, the structural weakness of their banking system and the importance of German exports to Europe’s job situation. Finding support in neither Europe nor Asia, Geithner quietly dropped the idea.
Instead of setting firm targets, the Seoul G20 leaders’ summit suggested the idea of “indicative guidelines” for determining when trade surpluses might be at unsustainable levels. The exact nature of these guidelines was left to a subsequent meeting of the finance ministers and central bank governors to work out. In February 2011, the ministers and governors met in Paris and agreed in principle on what factors might be included as “indicators,” but they did not yet agree on exactly what level of each indicator might be tolerated, or not, within the indicative guidelines. That quantification process was left for a subsequent meeting in April and the entire process was left up to the final approval of the G20 leaders themselves at the annual meeting, in Cannes in November 2011.
Meanwhile, the empowerment of the IMF as the watchdog of the G20 continued apace. In a March 2011 conference in Nanjing, China, attended by experts and economists, G20 president Nicolas Sarkozy said, with regard to balance of payments, “Greater supervision by the IMF appears indispensible.”
Saying that the G20 process moves forward at a glacial pace seems kind. Yet with twenty sovereign leaders and as many different agendas, it was not clear what the alternative would be if a global solution was to be achieved. This is the downside of Geithner’s theory of convening power. The absence of governance can be efficient if the people in the room are like-minded or if one party in the room has the ability to coerce the others, as had been true when the Fed confronted the fourteen families at the time of the LTCM bailout. When the assembled parties have widely divergent goals and different views on how to achieve those goals, the absence of leadership means that minute incremental change is the best that can be hoped for. By 2011 it appeared that the changes were so minute and so slow as to be no change at all.
The G20 was far from perfect as an institution, but it was all the world had. The G7 model seemed dead and the United Nations offered nothing comparable.