Friday, May 21, 2010

Oh No

This is bad. Very bad.
Officials in the U.S. and Europe concerned about the euro's decline are cautiously talking about a policy tool they haven't used in a decade: intervening in currency markets...

Marco Annunziata, chief economist at UniCredit in London, figures the euro would have to fall to about $1.10 in a week or so to prompt policy makers to act. Such a fall could shake markets globally, boost interest rates in Europe, and threaten to undermine a global recovery.

In a currency intervention, central banks buy large amounts of a weak currency in exchange for a strong currency, in hopes of reversing the weak currency's decline...

Ted Truman, a former international economics official in the Clinton and Obama Treasury departments, said that "it's right for authorities to be thinking about possibly protesting" the fall in the euro via intervention.
This is printing dollars and then shredding them and then setting the shreds on fire. This is insanity. The Euros tried this two weeks ago with their trillion dollar blast aimed at halting the Euro's decline and it hasn't worked. It hasn't worked because the scale of the intervention is all wrong, despite what seemed like the monstrous size of their effort. The global economy and investment pool dwarfs what the central banks can do, short of moves so large that they turn money into meaningless scraps of paper.

In short, the Euro is worth no more and no less than people are willing to pay for it. All the Central Bank machinations in the world can't change that. The Eurosocialists have wrecked the place and people are taking appropriate action because of it. The last thing we want to do is get in the middle of this.

Please, let November come quickly so we have a chance to get some grown ups into the decision making process.

Good news: The article goes on to say that the Fed is not considering this. Of course, up until the weekend before they did it, the European Central Bank adamantly swore it wasn't going to buy government bonds, either.

2 comments:

tim eisele said...

"This is printing dollars and then shredding them and then setting the shreds on fire."

Wouldn't that just be a wash? If you burn the dollars as fast as they are printed, then there's no net effect.

I thing a better analogy is printing dollars to buy Euros, and then setting the *Euros* on fire. Or maybe just running the Euros through the printing press again, overprinting them as dollars.

K T Cat said...

Gaack! A logical fallacy in my simile. I hate it when that happens.